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Containers library

Name: Anonymous 2009-12-30 18:03

One question for you /prog/!

Suppose you have a brand new language, which doesn't have any library yet. Which kind of basic containers / data structure would you expect?

Name: Anonymous 2010-01-01 11:56

>>29
I don't care too much about which containers are built-in, since there shouldn't be a noticeable difference between built-in and library data structures.
Why? Explain yourself.

What would you consider 'noticeable'? For simple GUI applications, there isn't a noticeable difference between Python apps and C apps. Conversely for high performance apps, there can be a noticeable difference between C data structures and the equivalent structures with critical parts hand-written in assembly.

Almost no languages actually fit your criteria, since I can roll my own data structures in C and add an interface to it in the language. Lots of library extensions to Python do this, e.g. the array module, and you can sacrifice type-safety and bounds-checking for even more speed. Sepples only fits your criteria because it has no built-in data structures. This is not a good thing; the resulting library specifications took decades to become complete, portable, bug-free, and reasonably fast. (I still don't understand why the fuck Stroustrup didn't just write the damn things himself and MIT-license them; this is CS101 ffs.)

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