- A Concurrent Affair - https://www.concurrentaffair.org -

Lists are Overused

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.

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