Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!decwrl!megatest!djones
From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: flexible arrays
Message-ID: <1327@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 89 00:29:39 GMT
References: <GARY.89Jan31114300@milo.mcs.clarkson.edu>
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 30

From article <GARY.89Jan31114300@milo.mcs.clarkson.edu>, by gary@milo.mcs.clarkson.edu (Gary Levin):

...

>    I hereby propose to do away with linear linked lists.

   Anybody wanna check that bathwater for babies before we
   throw it out?  BTW, "linear" and "list" seem redundant.

>    Instead we should use flexible arrays or sparse arrays.

I've got plenty of "container-class" packages in C and C++.
Some are based on links, some are "flexible", as the application
requires.  All have caching memory-allocation mechanisms which
are much more efficient than raw malloc().

(BTW, Pascal's type-system would make this somewhere between
 tedious and impossible.)


	  List             ... linked lists
          Hash             ... hash-tables with switchable
                                 ("virtual") hash and equiv function ptrs
          Avl              ... avl-trees
          PQ               ... priority queue (array, balanced heap)
          Fifo             ... queue
          Lifo             ... stack
          Vbuf             ... flexible byte-buffer
          Flex             ... flexible array
          Dig              ... directed graph