Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:aIued.412977$mD.116427_at_attbi_s02...
>
> [Setns and lists] are signficantly different. Note also there are totally ordered sets
> and partially ordered sets, and that neither of these are lists, either.

I forgot to mention something that I think is significant: it is common practice among application programmers to use a list for everything, including sets. In such cases, the programmer will "note to himself" that the elements in the list are unordered, and treat the list as a set, using the appropriate list operations.

I think this has a lot to do with why many (most?) programmers are unclear on when collections have meaningful order and when they don't. (It seems like this same confusion shows up in the Pick examples I've heard, where e.g. invoices or phone numbes are stored in a list under customers, even though they are not implicitly ordered.)

Marshall Received on Sat Oct 23 2004 - 20:26:59 CEST