list literal gotcha and suggestion

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Wed Sep 30 05:19:23 PDT 2009


2009/9/29 Gene Ray <evildeathmath at yahoo.com>:
> "Rare"?
>
> In my experience, Sets are not rare in well-written code; they're only rare in code where for whatever reason the developer has refused to use them

I asked around a little where I work (corporate type environment). In
general, the impression was that either developers don't know about
Set, or can't be bothered using them as List will do. Being
comfortable with List (and thus not having to think about another
type) was a factor.

One point I keep on making is that those of us here on this mailing
list, or reading any kind of blog, are completely atypical of the vast
bulk of developers. When taking decisions we have to be mindful of
that, as in essence its very hard to hear the view of the famed
"Java-Joe".

The question here seems simple - whether having a Set literal in the
language would encourage more usage of sets. Based on what I've seen,
I'd say thats marginal.

However, we know that the current syntax adds a (serious) language
puzzler. To me, that strongly suggests omitting set literals,
hopefully in favour of ListLiteral.toSet().

Stephen



More information about the coin-dev mailing list