Re: O(1) performance for insertions/deletions at the front of an Array/String

Hi,

In message "Re: O(1) performance for insertions/deletions at the front of an Array/String"
    on Mon, 4 Jul 2005 12:55:51 +0900, Eric Mahurin <[e-mail]> writes:

|Do you have a preliminary spec of what the API is going to look
|like?  I would mainly like to see what the definition the a
|character is going to be - instead of a Fixnum.

A character will be represented by a string that holds exactly one
character byte sequence.  A Python Way.

|> We won't remove existing methods from both classes, although
|> we don't encourage illusion of strings being array of something.

|Why?  For my purposes, I think of a String as a sequence of
|characters.  I don't mind too much if the definition of a
|character changes (to something variable length or whatever),
|but I do need all the methods that access characters now to
|still access characters (and not just bytes) - []/slice, []=,
|slice!, <<, size/length.

You don't have to worry about.  No methods will be changed, but they
will work based on characters, not on bytes as they do now.

|Also, did you have any opinion about the original topic on this
|thread? - making insertions/deletions at the front of an
|Array/String O(1).  This would be useful when dealing with a
|large Array or String.  You could also cut the random access
|insert/delete time in half by taking advantage of it.

I think the idea is pretty interesting.  But I don't have enough
knowledge to estimate how much useful in general case.  Let me think
for a while.

							matz.