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Comment by friendly_chap

12 years ago

"You can argue that advanced language constructs will make it easier to write correct code to implement data structures, but it's not a magic bullet."

There is nothing advanced about ADTs.

"The Go authors argue that a simple programming language with loops, pointers and arrays is all you need to implement any data structure you need."

It's all about increasing the level of abstraction. There is a reason we don't code in assembly anymore. Of course machine code is all you need to implement any data structure, but how convenient is it?

"I find this a good example of a data structure for which I see little or no benefit in being modeled as an ADTs:"

So you found a single counterexample which (according to you) would not benefit from ADTs.

" On the other hand I don't know about good examples of ADTs used outside of the context of functional programming, do you have some pointers?"

I dislike pointers (a necessary evil if you have mutation I guess...), but here is one example:

data Gender = Male | Female vs type Gender int; const ( Male Gender = iota; Female )

Combine the first with pattern matching and you find yourself in awesomenessland (ie. code becomes readable, type safe).

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friendly_chap

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ithkuil  12 years ago

>> On the other hand I don't know about good examples of ADTs used outside of the context of functional programming, do you have some pointers? > I dislike pointers (a necessary evil if you have mutation I guess...), but here is one example

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I asked you if you had some links to some interesting examples of ADT outside the context of functional programming. Because I was assuming that this wasn't a discussion about Go vs purely functional data structures.

Your example clearly shows the benefits of strong typing with fully described types. My point that this is orthogonal with Rob Pike's position about the importance of data structures.

Data structures exist independently on how we represent them. I don't see any irony or conflict in highlighting the importance of data structure vs. implementing language features that make it easier to write correct implementation of them.