Re: thoughts about the Range concept

On 30 Mar 2005, at 10:20, Dierk Koenig wrote:

> Ok, I think I got it.
> Thanx for your patient explanations.
>
> To sum up my misconceptions:
> a) Ranges are not intervals
>    (maybe we introduce an Interval concept later?)

They are implemented as such - as immutable intervals - though we 
currently have 2 implementations; IntRange for efficient integer ranges 
(which are really common) and ObjectRange (which are less so) but work 
with any Object which is comparable.

> b) contains() and isCase() ( and thus filtering with
>    grep and classification with switch) do not apply
>    compareTo() to the bounds but check for element containment
>    in the backing list.

The is no backing list; the contains method works on range checking 
based on the upper/lower bounds

> c) lowerBound <= a <= upperBound does _not_ imply
>    (lowerBound..upperBound).contains(a)

It does currently at least

> d) plus() is not closed under Ranges but returns a List

Any method on Range/List which returns a new List, will return a real 
list. So adding/creating subList() mostly right now will create a new, 
mutable List. Though the Range itself is immutable.

> effect:
> - Ranges cannot be used like in Ruby (where === is Ruby's
>   version of Groovy's isCase())
> C:\Documents and Settings\dierk>irb
> irb(main):001:0> (0.0..1.0)===(0.99)
> => true

Why? That should work in Groovy when using the ObjectRange; provided 
the upper & lower bound objects compare with the element you're 
performing the comparison with.

> My personal opinion:
> a) is counter-intuitive
> b) restricts applicability of Ranges for classification to IntRanges

There's ObjectRange too

James
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