This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 43 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 43 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
> VECTOR-NONEMTPY?, I suppose, really is a little pointless, but > VECTOR-EMPTY? > can be useful to pass to other functions, and I also desired > to keep it > for > congruency with Scott G. Miller's upcoming collection SRFI > (though now > *-EMPTY? > has turned into COLLECTION-EMPTY?, and I don't know if he's going to > change > it...just wait and find out). But my point that an empty vector is a pathological case remains valid. An empty list, or an empty collection/set, however, is perfectly legitimate. > Considering that SRFI 1, libraries of Haskell, libraries of > OCaml, and > several > other libraries use the term 'zip' and 'unzip,' I think I'll leave it > with that > -- and anyways, can you think of a better term? Frankly, I can not. But maybe someone else comes up with a better name. > At first it was just a translation of alists from SRFI 1, and I was > considering > removing them entirely, but Scott G. Miller was against this -- his > argument > being that they took up much, much less space than either hash tables > or alists > -- and so, having a bit better of a reason to keep them, I kept them. I do not consider association vectors evil, but I see no reason to use them: If the dictionary is small, you can use association lists and forget about memory usage (most of the time). If the dictionary is large, you can not use association lists because searching for the keys becomes too inefficient. Unfortunately, the same applies to association vectors. Hence, you have to use hash tables anyway. Regards Michael Burschik