2017-06-30 8:28 GMT-03:00 Norbert Hartl <[email protected]>:
>> Am 30.06.2017 um 12:03 schrieb Stephane Ducasse <[email protected]>:

>> recently I started to read a book on machine learning and they
>> manipulate dictionary of dictionary. (So I started my own
>> implementation and I will switch to DataFrame).
>>
> having an abstract notation for a structure (or dictionary of dictionary) is 
> something really useful. I work a lot with JSON and the creation in pharo is 
> done the same way but you have to call asDictionary all the time which is 
> annoying. This can be rethought and would make things less ugly if we had a 
> good way. If it is close to S-expressions the better.

I don't what black magic requires, but having a syntax compatible with
JSON would be a HUGE boost.

Maybe because of where the keys are located on my keyboard layout, but
the #-> selector, although I understand its semantics, it's cumbersome
to type. I'd love a more compact representation.
If the compiler could be modified to accept $: as a message selector,
then we could map it to return an Association as #-> currently does. I
can't foresee the implications of such change.


> What I don't like about it is that the object literal exposes the internal 
> implementation of the object. Everything is based on index. So it could 
> suffer the same problem as fuel. When you don't have the exact same code the 
> deserialization fails. As a dictionary is both, an array of associations and 
> a key-value store, it works perfectly there. But for other objects I have 
> doubts. Especially is in a lot of contexts you need to have a mapping of 
> internal state to external representation. It can be applied afterwards but 
> I'm not sure that can work all the time.

One of the stregths of the JSON format is it doesn't matter in which
order the data arrives, otherwise you'd use a Array, because you
already know the indices of the data you're looking for.

Regards!

--
Esteban.

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