It always annoyed me that #keys and #values create a new collection
object. Form an object-oriented stand-point of view, what would rather
make sense is to return a collection that delegates to the dictionary.
For example, DictionaryKeys would be a subclass of Collection, behave
like a Set and be implemented along ...
Dictionary>>keys
^ DictionaryKeys on: self
DictionaryKeys>>do: aBlock
dictionary keysDo: aBlock
DictionaryKeys>>includes: anObject
^ dictionary includesKey: anObject
DictionaryKeys>>species
^ Set
I bet that this would not only result in a major performance
improvement, but also greatly reduce memory consumption. Furthermore
it would solve the problem that #keys suddenly has totally different
performance characteristics as we decide to return an Array instead of
a Set. For example, it wouldn't matter anymore if you wrote
aDictionary includesKey: #foo
or
aDictionary keys includes: #foo
I see only obvious problem for such an approach and this is when the
dictionary changes and the keys are stored somewhere. Some users might
not expect the keys to change too.
Cheers,
Lukas
--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch
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