From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2009-03-05T02:38:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Any solutions to Ruby's inconsistencies?

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:01:27 -0500, James Coglan wrote:

> [Note:  parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
> 
> 
>>
>> > Or is my C.S. idea of a Hash too limited?  Granted in Java they have
>> > HashMap, but if you enter one value and get a second one out it is a
>> > Map, regardless of how the keys are stored.
>>
>> Hey, why aren't Arrays called Maps instead?
> 
> 
> 
> I've always found Java's naming of collections to be contrary to its
> idea of OO in that it exposes implementation details, e.g. HashSet,
> LinkedHashSet and TreeSet really ought to be called Set, OrderedSet and
> SortedSet to reflect their intended use rather than their internal
> structure.

No, no, no. In Java, you have the interfaces Set, and SortedSet (no 
OrderedSet, I suppose it would have exactly the same operations as a 
Set), which don't define any operations, and AbstractSet which is a 
helper class for people implementing sets.

Then you create instantiations HashSet, LinkedHashSet, TreeSet, which you 
instantiate *knowing* what data you intend to use it for, and which 
behind-the-scenes implementation has the best performance characteristics 
for that data. (You *should* be allowed that choice, in general.) Then 
you pass those around using the aforementioned implementation-agnostic 
interfaces.

-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/