I think I can really make this really general statement: Lists are overused. We’re using lists all the time. But a list implies an order, and often that order doesn’t matter. What we want many times are sets.
Today I tracked down a bug that had… bugged me for a while, but not seriously enough to warrant a thorough investigation: When I’m instrumenting a file A, I create a file A\_i, and then I want to rename the file A to A~ and A\_i to A. For some files, this was failing.
Today I realized that it was failing because a file A~ was already there. At first I had no idea why, but pretty soon I realized that it was there because I had listed file A twice. I shouldn’t have been using a list of files to instrument, I should have used a set.
I’ve made this observation several times, and have several times already substituted sets for lists. Today I made another effort in this direction.
