Re: tree model complaints

[Tim Müller <zen18864 zen co uk>]

On Sunday 15 August 2004 11:37, D M wrote:

>       I'm implementing a custom tree model in my application. And one
> thing itrigues me a little - why does it involve implementing
> a functions which are complementary - getting n'th child is kind
> of equivalent of getting first child and then iterating
> over consecutive elements. 

Just because the result is the same doesn't mean that those are equivalent 
actions. Imagine a model that can access row data in a way where accessing 
the 9999th row takes more or less the same time as accessing the 1st row. In 
this case it would be madness to iterate through all previous 9998 rows just 
to retrieve the 9999th row's data. In other words: it depends on the 
underlying data structures whether those two methods of accessing the n-th 
row are more or less equivalent or not.

Cheers
 -Tim