From: gotoken@... (GOTO Kentaro)
Date: 2001-01-09T00:52:10+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:8878] good container?

In message "[ruby-talk:8820] Re: No :<, :>, etc. methods for Array"
    on 01/01/08, "Christoph Rippel" <crippel@primenet.com> writes:
>I see your point ... . I guess my idea was to be less greedy
>and to reorganize the current Array and Hash classes in a class
>hierarchy which effectively takes away (and sometimes adding and/or 
>redefining) most of their current functionality. The core languages
>does not provide among others things a predefined Stack class, 
>(Multi)Set (or their ordered variants)- instead this functionality 
>was ``crammed into'' the Hash and Array container classes taking
>away clarity of intent, functionality, possible optimizations and
>as Kevin points out creating class interfaces with a pretty steep
>learning curve. 
>
>In my opinion it would be a good thing if the standard Ruby
>distribution would ship with a ``nice library'' of well integrated
>basic container classes 

I see what you say just now.  Thank you Christoph.  Well, such
development can be done efficiently by release-test-improve loop.  So,
I'd like to wait RAA-entry(s) of containers written by anyone.  If
cachy one appears for everyone, Matz adopt that as a standard library.

>class ContainerClass
>ZERO  =  0 # or something similar like the hypothetical Numeric::ZERO 
>def   def sum(if_empty = type::ZERO)
>..
>end
>...
>end 
>
>This way you can override the generic ZERO in a specialized
>ContainerClass 

I think operations like sum is a kind of cross-hierarchical spec of
container and it should be provided as mix-in, perhaps.

Cle and me had a series of discussions about container hierarchy in
the context of how to realize sutably reverse ordered version of each.
You can find them in some threads, e.g.:

`New feature for Ruby'
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/vframe.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/407?404-621

Thanks, 

-- Gotoken