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This problem transcends documentation of any given language's standard library. list.delete(value) in any programming language is a degenerate without an orderi
by jholloway7 6y ago
This problem transcends documentation of any given language's standard library. list.delete(value) in any programming language is a degenerate without an ordering or hash built-in to the underlying data structure.
If you ever need to delete based on value, it's a smell that a list is the wrong data structure. I'm sure there are cases in constrained environments where a linear search is heuristically okay, but generally in application development list.delete(value) is a hint that you're using the wrong data structure.
- mhaymo 6y agoGood point. I guess the reason the author finds removing from lists to be relevant is because there is no Set structure in the Go standard library. They should use a `map[t]bool`, but that is non-obvious to many programmers.
- dullcrisp 6y agoMy Google search suggests that maps in Go aren’t ordered. If so this doesn’t work in place of an array.
- vlowther 6y ago`map[t]struct{}` saves you a few bytes per entry. Just use the `_,found := foo[key]` form of lookup
- nitrix 6y agomap[t]struct{} so that the values don't require any space.
- simiones 6y agoUnfortunately, map[t]bool (or map[t]struct{}) only works for special structs that happen to have equality defined for them. It's not a general purpose solution, it's just a hack.