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From: murali@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (S Muralidharan)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components
Subject: Need for multiple implementations
Message-ID: <82613@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 1 Aug 90 16:46:43 GMT
Sender: murali@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
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Organization: Ohio State Computer Science
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I am surprised to read that the need for multiple implementations of an
abstraction (specifically, almost constant function) is not obvious.
The almost constant function is an excellent example to demonstrate why you
need multiple implementations.  There are several implementations (e.g.,
BST, hashed search, etc.), and no one has better performance behavior than
others in all repects.  A client of this abstracion will choose one of the
several implementations based on performance requirements.

Murali