Sentinels in collections, was RE: Primitive Queue<any T> considerations

[Vitaly Davidovich]

This may work for a set, but doesn't necessarily generalize to any data
structure.  Moreover, you're now checking the argument for being one of the
two sentinels on all these operations.  There are times when side data or
out-of-band data is warranted, but those occasions should be dictated by
things other than lack of efficiently expressing a nullable primitive.

On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Rezaei, Mohammad A. <Mohammad.Rezaei at gs.com
> wrote:

> Many primitive collections use sentinels *without* requiring removal of
> those in the collection. This is done by storing a bit of side information.
> For example, for a set of int, GS Collections uses 0 and 1 as sentinels
> (meaning empty and removed, respectively). Every call to methods like
> get/contains/add/etc first checks to see if the value is a sentinel, and if
> so, queries/updates the side data. For a set, the side data is tiny and
> trivial: there is a single byte that encode if the set contains 0, 1, both
> or none.
>
> Thanks
> Moh
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: valhalla-dev [mailto:valhalla-dev-bounces at openjdk.java.net] On
> Behalf Of
> >Vitaly Davidovich
> >Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2015 2:31 PM
> >To: Richard Warburton
> >Cc: valhalla-dev at openjdk.java.net
> >Subject: Re: Primitive Queue<any T> considerations
> >
> >Although I agree that sometimes a sentinel or even an entire range of
> >values is available to indicate absence, I don't think it's the right
> >answer to the question.  In particular, if you're writing a general
> purpose
> >collection, you cannot expect your users to remove one possible value from
> >their universe to signal absence.  The collections that do this today are
> >simply working around lack of nullable primitives.
> >
> >On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 2:18 PM, Richard Warburton <
> >richard.warburton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I'm not sure about the default null-indicator because every time a
> queue is
> >> > needed in our library, that can serve a source with unique choice of a
> >> > default-null value. It is unlikely the users of the library want or
> can
> >> > specify that all the time.
> >> >
> >>
> >> I appreciate that this is diverging directly form your language related
> >> question, but it is pertinent to writing anyfied collections using
> >> Valhalla. My experience using primitive specialised collections is that
> it
> >> has always been possible to have a sentinel value, though obviously my
> >> experience won't necessary reflect that of every single person in the
> Java
> >> community. It isn't always appropriate for it to be 0, which is what I
> >> think T.default is currently going to return for primitives and when
> I've
> >> done primitive specialised collections before they allow you to specify
> the
> >> missing value sentinel.
> >>
> >> Have you got of an actual genuine use case where a sentinel value
> doesn't
> >> work well, rather than a theoretical "hey, maybe you want to have a set
> >> that contains every possible int?"
> >>
> >> regards,
> >>
> >>   Richard Warburton
> >>
> >>   http://insightfullogic.com
> >>   @RichardWarburto <http://twitter.com/richardwarburto>
> >>
>