Simon Cozens wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 04:36:35PM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote:
>
>> SC> Do you see any ESP there? Do you see any parsing of arbitrary
>> SC> pieces of code? No, me neither.
>>
>> and even creating a function to extract the key is not for beginners in
>> many case. most of the time i see issues with the ST is with key
>> extraction.
>
>
> With all due respect, that's not been my experience. Even beginners know
> how to do things like "length", by far the most common case for the ST.
All this talk of making the ST accessible to beginners is misguided.
It's not a core capability, it's an
optimization, and one with alternatives. If a beginner lacks the
sophistication to understand map sort
map, then their programs probably don't need anything better than sort {
$a->{'key1'}{'key2'} <=>
$b->{'key1'}{'key2'} }, or perhaps the orcish manuever if they are
feeling frisky. Sure, you got the
extra dereferences, but for most of programs the novice will write, it's
just one of many suboptimal
constructs they will use.
