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From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: C's sins of commission
Message-ID: <-M.6315@xds13.ferranti.com>
Date: 13 Nov 90 20:58:19 GMT
References: <27376@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Lines: 21

Piercarlo Grandi:
> ]Ah no, this cannot pass. Lists and trees are *implementations*, and when
> ]you draw them you draw specific encodings of such implementations.

David Gudeman:
> No, this cannot pass.  Lists and trees are mental structures that
> humans use to visualize things.

While I'm generally in the bit-bangers camp, I must agree with Piercarlo here.
The basic things that people work with are "chunks of data". Lists, trees,
tries, and so on are methods of implementing these databases in efficient
ways. There's nothing fundamental about them.

Unfortunately... in the real world they *are* vital.

The problem is that there's no language I know of that really lets you get
away with writing your program in terms of relations and get within an order
of magnitude in speed of a well-written lower level implementation. The
languages that so let you work at this level tend to be DBMSes and those
database language/code generator hybrids called 4GLs. And they're all slow
as molasses in January.
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
+1 713 274 5180.   'U`
peter@ferranti.com