Vadim Antonov's Grail

[David Jeske]

On Wed, Jan 06, 1999 at 09:44:51AM +0100, Laurent Martelli wrote:
>     David> Sure, you can simulate unordered collections to the
>     David> requesting software, however, if you have to based
>     David> unordered collections on ordered collections, then you will
>     David> never be able to have a code-optimizer/run-time which takes
>     David> advantage of the unordered nature of the collection.
> 
> I'm sorry, but I think that having an order does not prevent you from
> applying optimizations that do not require any order.
>
> ANyway, how would you implement an unordered collection on today's
> hardware, without having any hidden order ?

It wasn't meant to be a literal problem, but instead an example to
illustrate a class of problem. However, I've been told by my local
LISP guru that modern lisp implementations have optimized
implementations of higher-level abstractions. (i.e. implementations
for higher level abstractions like structs, associative arrays, etc,
are not built on the lower-level types.)

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net