Re: hash tables: print, read, print-readably
Mike Kupfer writes:
Well, we could have a discussion about when internal information
should be displayed,
We could, but I'd be strongly in favor of the status quo: objects with
an unreadable print representationshould have a representation that
displays any information that developers find useful.
Yeah, I thought it a little odd when I first noticed that. But I
convinced myself that for a literal constant, the current number of
items is the same as the expected long-run number. ;-)
Not if you interrupt the process immediately after initialization, and
it decides to dump an empty table to reread later.
The thing is, for make-hash-table and the readable representation,
the
number refers to objects, not buckets.
Sure. All representations refer to objects. The unreadable
I was thinking either "buckets" or "slots".
I don't like either, because the more interesting number is usually
the number of objects, not the number of buckets. I would rather use
:size, or maybe :sizes, because that's the semantics of those
numbers. The latter might be interesting if we ever decide to keep
the initialization size around, then the unreadable format might be
:sizes used/estimated/buckets
and for printable the semantics would be
:size max{used,estimated}
(This could cause an upward drift in the requested sizes, but only if
you actually needed it).
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