| panu@nospam.com 2007-03-09, 4:18 am |
| Chris Uppal wrote:
>...
> But there is a sense in which a Dictionary /is/ a Set of
Associations, so any
> Set which we can use to express some matching condition is
polymorphic with a
> Dictionary with the same contents. So we would be being inconsistent
if we
> treated a Dictionary any differently from how we treat a Set with
equivalent
> contents.
Sorry, not able to respond to all the great
suggestions here now, not sure I could, but
this one caught my eye ...
Dictionaries ain't necessarily Sets of Associations.
That could be seen as an implementation artifact.
Dictionaries could be implemented some other way.
Similarly as you pointed out, Strings should be
viewed (from the API standpoint) as Strings, not
as Collections of Characters - except when looking
at the implementation, which is a different story.
Thanks for the collaborations. I think there could
be something to this, as opposed to all those XML
Schema Languages etc. Smalltalk might perhaps once
again lead the way. It's not that there's something
God-given correctness about ST. It just seems to
make it easier to think straight..
-Panu Viljamaa
|