[swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0065 A New Model for Collections and Indices

[plx]

> On Apr 13, 2016, at 5:34 AM, Haravikk <swift-evolution at haravikk.me> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 13 Apr 2016, at 04:46, plx via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Invalidation is hard and I wouldn’t want anything held up to try and find a solution first.
> 
> Oh I agree, that was partly my point though; while this proposal may leave us with the "un-Swifty" issue of being unable to explicitly handle invalidation, it should be possible to solve that later, i.e- this proposal does’t make us any more vulnerable to that problem than we are now, but I definitely agree that we could do with some kind of invalidation mechanism in future that developers can actually implement or respond to. I guess I was more thinking out loud about whether the problem affects the proposal or not, but I don’t think that solving it will place any restrictions on the API as proposed, definitely deserves a proposal of its own once the new indexing system is in place though!

There was a design document linked in one of the earlier discussions that IIRC suggested some collections would want to maintain a "revision count” value, with their indices then holding a snapshot of that “revision count” at their time of creation.

For something like Array that’s a bit heavyweight.

“Invalidation" is also IMHO a bit under-defined without an associated “for what?”:

  var letters = [“a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”]

  // indexOfB == 1
  let indexOfB = letters.indexOf(“b”)

  letters.insert(“z”, atIndex: indexOfB)

…is `index` invalid or not? IMHO it would depend on what you want to do with it.