Re: [Vala] [Libgee][RFC] Making Map<K, V> a Collection<Map.Entry<K, V> - Was: Libgee's Roadmap proposal

[Jiří Zárevúcky <zarevucky jiri gmail com>]

2009/7/24 Fredderic <magentus gmail com>:
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:21:14 +0200,
> Jiří Zárevúcky <zarevucky jiri gmail com> wrote:
>
> > 2009/7/24 Ali Sabil <ali sabil gmail com>:
> > > On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Didier "Ptitjes"<ptitjes free fr>
> > > > Please comment and argue ;)
> > > Could you please explain the rationale behind this change ? What
> > > would be the benefit from  turning a Map into a collection of Pair ?
> >
> > Efficient iteration over all the Map's elements. Otherwise you'd have
> > to retrieve a collection of keys and lookup corresponding value for
> > every single one of them.
>
> Why not simply make Collections contain objects adhering to a
> CollectionElement interface which would cover equality testing (about
> all the collection ever really needs to do), returning of the elements
> value (which may or may not be the same as the data being equality
> tested), and generally considered immutable (no standard "set"
> method).  Since the collection only needs to know how to handle
> CollectionElement's, there's no problem with types.  You obtain the
> element, and invoke it's get_value() method.
>
> [...]

Honestly, I wouldn't use such classes if I had to implement every
collection by myself.