On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh.. again..
@Ralph: if you don't want sets with nils, just don't put them there.
Why this isn't obvious for you?
Take a Squeak , which already supporting nils in sets.
Have you seen ANY reported breakage of existing code because of this?

On 12 April 2010 05:25, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Apr 2010, Ralph Boland wrote:
>
>>> Hi levente/igor
>>
>>> this hashedCollection is still on my radar. Now I was wondering if I
>>> should > work first on Set with nil or HashedCollection.
>>> Any idea/suggestion?
>>
>>> Stef
>>
>> I think moving Dictionary out from under Set is a great idea.
>> However I am not convinced having a class HashedCollection
>> to share common code between Set and Dictionary is worth it.
>> I would just tolerate the code duplication because these classes
>> are so important. �Given that Squeak is going to support
>
> I don't see your point here. In Squeak that would mean duplicating 17 + 9
> methods (instance/class side) + the two instance variables for no reason.
>
>> HashedCollection though, I would hate to see yet another difference
>> between Pharo and Squeak. I expect that the difference is unlikely
>> to break code shared between Pharo and Squeak though.
>>
>> I was always against allowing the addition of nil to sets.
>> This change means that every time I accidentally add nil to a set
>> the error will go undetected and will be difficult to track down once
>> the problem is discovered.
>
> Collections are still not ment to be bug detectors... Btw, do you notice if
> you add nil as a key to a Dictionary? (or add nil to an OrderedCollection?)
>
>> My solution to escape this change in my code will be to subclass
>> Set and any of its subclasses that I use and add code in the subclasses
>> to test for addition of nil and report an error when it happens.
>> This will allow bugs to show up sooner.
>
> You can (ab)use PluggableSet if you really need this by adding the nil check
> to the hashBlock.
>
>> An alternative is just to modify Set itself by adding a test for
>> adding nil to a set and then reporting an error. �This change will break
>> down of course once there are instances of actually adding nil to a set
>> in Squeak/Pharo.
>> Are there any such occurrences is Squeak 4.1?
>
> Who knows, nil can be everywhere: #(1 2 nil) asSet.
>
>> Now that this feature will be in Squeak 4.1, however, we again have
>> the problem of divergence of code between Pharo and Squeak. �The
>> problem won't be there immediately but eventually this feature
>> will actually be used in Squeak.
>> Of course the issue here is how often it is useful to allow
>> addition of nil to a Set. �For the approximately 100,000 lines of
>> code I have written in Smalltalk the answer is 0 explaining my
>> opposition to this change. �For some others though the answer
>> must be different.
>> For me this change will delay my moving my code from Squeak
>> 3.10 to 4.1+ (and might even tempt me to move to Pharo :-)).
>> Note that I use Sets and Dictionaries a lot. �When my Squeak project
>> runs 80% of the time is spent on �Set/Dictionary operations.
>
> You could have added nil as a key to a Dictionary and that went
> undetected...
>
>
> Levente
>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Ralph Boland
>>
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>
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--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.

_______________________________________________

Heh, well I understand Ralph's point quite well, since I know that in the project I'm working on there are places in the code that depend on the fact that sets can't contain nil. So the following would break if VisualAge added that possibility:

#( 1 2 3 4 nil 6 7 nil) asSet asArray�
�=> #(1 2 3 4 6 7)

I'm not deciding one way or the other which way is right, just adding an observation.

--
Cheers,
Peter