Thank you all for your comments! I'm glad to learn that I was too pessimistic :)
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 09:25:45PM +0100, Tomas Hlavaty wrote: > well, abstinence often leads to frustration;-) .. or to enlightenment ;-) > You mention a few times "wasting tag bits". Isn't the other and maybe > more important point that arrays would not work with the way current > garbage collection works? Basically, the heap would become > non-homogeneous and fragmented, breaking the beauty, simplicity and > efficiency of current heap management. Well, the garbage collector could easily be extended to know about arrays. But, yes, fragmentation was the main reason for the single-cell design (especially in the initial versions, when the gc used a compacting algorithm). I avoided most argumentation _pro_ lists to keep the article short, and packed it into the fuzzy statement "... any Lisp programmer will know them". On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:43:55AM +0700, Henrik Sarvell wrote: > I don't understand what the problem is, as far as array functionality > goes one can use (get), and for hash functionality (assoc) or (idx), > did I miss something? Not at all. This was exactly the point. As long as we have 'get' and other list functions, we can simulate the behavior of arrays. So, again, thanks to you all for the support! I don't have to defend that design decision in the future again! :) Cheers, - Alex -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:[email protected]?subject=Unsubscribe
