At 03:37 AM 12/5/98 , Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>On Wed, 2 Dec 1998, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>>
>> [+] Looks good. Some further suggestions:
>>
>> The new collection terminology is EList, ConstList, FlexList, EMap,
>> ConstMap, and FlexMap. Wherever you say "List", you should probably say
>> either "EList" or "list".
>
>[?] I don't understand why "EList" is necessary. What information
>value is added by calling it an "EList" instead of just a "List"?
>We don't prefix other types with "E", like "EPromises" or "EIntegers".
>It seems like just another issue to potentially confuse people over.
[-] I had wanted to call them "List" and "Map", and we had decided to do so before I realized the problem. Before proceeding, I decided to check out the new Java 1.2 collection classes to be sure there wasn't a conflict. Not only do they use both "List" and "Map", but they define them to represent essentially the same distinction. However, unlike the 1.0.x..1.1.x collection classes, their protocol is to horrible to contemplate being compatible with.
So "EList" and "EMap" represents E's take on the same List/Map distinction, but with a reasonably small protocol, reasonably similar to the earlier non-horrible collection classes. Because of browser inertia, these earlier collection classes will remain the ones in common use for a while; hopefully long enough.
When I realized the conflict, perhaps I should have switched away from "*List" and "*Map" altogether, but I just wanted this issue to be settled already!
>[+] I think it's good to explain this example out. Perhaps we could
>start with the first attempt at "average" and then compare it to the
>second one.
[+] agreed. Could you revise you for-loop chapter accordingly?