ADTs

Malcolm Dew-Jones yf110 at victoria.tc.ca
Tue Mar 4 14:12:05 CST 2003



On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, nkuipers wrote:

> So I'm taking this course in data structures in Java.  

> Now, I fully realize that 
> between hashes and arrays, and the rich set of Perl built-ins (like splice), 
> there isn't really a *need* for CPAN modular definitions of doubly linked 
> lists and so forth.  

Exactly.

> But what if I don't want to program with fundamental 
> types yet stick with Perl?  These abstractions make for easy programming and 
> self-documenting code (at least for a maintainer or someone not too familiar 
> with Perl), and I'm curious if I missed something on CPAN or if this simply 
> isn't a Perl thing to do.  Perl includes the fundamental data types scalar, 
> array, and hash, would it be appropriate to also include a selection of ADTs?


Those things make it easy(er) for a maintainer of a language that makes it
hard to program.

It almost all cases, with perl, the task is simply to correctly describe
the data.  Then you simply use the data when you need it.

It's kind of like switching from old datebase code where most of the work
consists of manipulating/merging/massaging the data to get what you want,
to a relational database where you simply describe the data you want and
it's there when you need it. 





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