Re: MV Keys (was: Key attributes with list values)

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote in

> Marshall Spight wrote:
> > David Cressey wrote:
> > >
> > > The way Pick (and I presume most of the MV family) represent lists is
> > > inherently ordered. And, whenever I ask Dawn, or any of the other
Pickies
> > > who dorp in form time to time whether the order in a list conveys
> > > information or not, the answer is always the same:
> > > "the programmer knows what the data means".
>
> I might have said it that way, but the way I would typically say it is
> that the user knows what it means.

This answers that question. But it raises another: how does a user share data with another user who may not (yet) know what the data means?

> Understood. However, I would think there are some optimizations that
> can occur by keeping data as a list.
>

Agreed. When we implemented arrays in MDL we were concerned about a simple issue of performance.

How do you access the 1000th element without scanning past 999 other elements? The Lisp 1.5 was content to live with the bottleneck. We were not. Received on Mon Feb 27 2006 - 13:29:58 CET