[swift-evolution] Changes to RangeReplaceableCollectionType

[Haravikk]

> On 29 Feb 2016, at 11:11, Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:54 AM, Haravikk <swift-evolution at haravikk.me <mailto:swift-evolution at haravikk.me>> wrote:
> 
> How would you decide equality?  You would have two collections, one on
> the left, and one on the right, and each of those has a different
> concept of equality via the stored 'isOrderedBefore' closure.

To me two collections are equal so long as their contents are the same, and in the same order. In other words the actual closure isn’t necessary to the comparison, though obviously it will affect it, since elements stored in ascending numeric order clearly won’t match the same elements in descending numeric order.

> I'm not opposed to adding a new protocol.  What seems strange to me is
> that you are describing various collections that clearly can't
> implement RangeReplaceableCollection, and trying to weaken protocol's
> guarantees so that they can.

I’m not trying to weaken its guarantees; the only thing directly affecting RangeReplaceableCollectionType would be removing the initialisers, as I don’t think they’re necessary to implementing that type (though of course I welcome any description as to why they may be necessary).

Otherwise a new protocol is exactly what I’m interested in; you mentioned an ExpandableCollectionType, which I think is a start, though it should probably have add() and addContentsOf() methods rather than appends (this way they place no guarantees on where elements will go, only that they are added). While the add() method would be a synonym of append() for arrays, it would be useful for aligning with Set I think.

Moving the removeRange() and related methods (removeAtIndex etc.) would take them away from RangeReplaceableCollectionType (it should extend whatever new protocol is added), but the idea is to separate the concept of removing things by index, and replacing them/performing insertions.

Basically I’d like to tweak the protocols such that a generic collection can be expanded, and its elements accessed in an order, but that order may be defined by the type itself; to me, inserting a value directly at a specific index is a more specialist type.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20160229/ae3d4838/attachment.html>