Thread overview
rationale: [] and ()
Dec 10, 2010
Manfred_Nowak
Dec 10, 2010
Simen kjaeraas
Dec 10, 2010
Simen kjaeraas
Dec 10, 2010
Manfred_Nowak
December 10, 2010
What is the rationale for having both: normal and square brackets?

I ask because in plain old C I interpreted the lexical difference of
funtion calls and accesses to elements of arrays as a permanent hint for
linear runtime in case of arrays. But because of `opIndex' this assumption
has been invalidated a long time ago.

-manfred
December 10, 2010
Manfred_Nowak <svv1999@hotmail.com> wrote:

> What is the rationale for having both: normal and square brackets?

Mostly that C has both. Changing this would make the language feel rather
more different from C/C++ than it already does.

It is also syntactic sugar for element lookup. Rather than having to
write some function name (that may or may not be the same for all
collections), you can use [].


> I ask because in plain old C I interpreted the lexical difference of
> funtion calls and accesses to elements of arrays as a permanent hint for
> linear runtime in case of arrays.
>
> But because of `opIndex' this assumption has been invalidated a long
> time ago.

No it hasn't. opIndex should still  be O(1), it just can't be enforced.

-- 
Simen
December 10, 2010
On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:42:51 -0500, Simen kjaeraas <simen.kjaras@gmail.com> wrote:

> Manfred_Nowak <svv1999@hotmail.com> wrote:

>> But because of `opIndex' this assumption has been invalidated a long
>> time ago.
>
> No it hasn't. opIndex should still  be O(1), it just can't be enforced.
>

er.. make that O(lg(n)) :)  Essentially sub-linear.

-Steve
December 10, 2010
Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:42:51 -0500, Simen kjaeraas <simen.kjaras@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Manfred_Nowak <svv1999@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> But because of `opIndex' this assumption has been invalidated a long
>>> time ago.
>>
>> No it hasn't. opIndex should still  be O(1), it just can't be enforced.
>>
>
> er.. make that O(lg(n)) :)  Essentially sub-linear.

Ah, yes. Sorry.


-- 
Simen
December 10, 2010
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> Essentially sub-linear.
... and I meant "_constant_ runtime in case of arrays".

BTW: did you notice, that the modell assumption of an access time independent from the total length of a used slice of memory seems to become wrong?

-manfred