On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:18:43 -0700, bearophileHUGS wrote: > So I don't accept so much different data structures to have the > same name
You need to adjust the current mindset slightly (but in an important way to understand the "why" behind this idea). The current notion is: list and dict is a data structure. With this idea, list and dict is an abstract type, not a data structure. array, linked list, binary tree, red- black tree, hashed are data structure. We create a data structure by passing the data structure's identifier string to a factory function provided by the abstract type. There are two possible syntax sugar: a = list.bintree([...]) b = list([...]) # also for backward compat, have reasonable default In short, the data structures doesn't share the same name, the abstract data-type does. The suggestion is to change the place where we define the what data structure to use. > Said that, for a high-level language like Python I can see another > possible solution. To have a type that contains several kinds of data > structures, for example a "dict" that contains a hash implementation, a > red-black tree, etc. Such data structure can use a small part of the > computational power given to it to collect statistics usages of each > object (or each variable, that may contain in succession several ojects > of the same type). Such data structure can then at run time adapt > dynamically, chosing to use the implementation fitter for the specific > usage of each object or variable (the programmer can give hints of > course, or sometimes even coerce the usage a specific implementation). > (such statistics can also be saved on disk to be used for the successive > run of the program, to help them work well from the start too, and not > just after a while). If this capability works well in practice, then it > can solve the problem you were talking about, I think. > > I presume data structures in future high-level languages will be quite > more able to adapt themselves to their usages. Today it's the second > time I talk about future programming languages :-) Although you said you disagree with the general idea, you actually take the idea two steps further, I take that as an implicit agreement to several parts of the idea. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
