Re: multidim. containers

<X-posted to [email protected]>

David L. Nicol wrote:
> If arrays as we know them implement by using a key space restricted to
> integers, I think a reasonable way to get matrices would be to open
> up their key space to lists of integers.
>
I've been thinking along exactly the same lines. There's a lot of language
issues to consider to get this to work consistently, such as interaction
with reduce(), notation for slices across a dimension (and generalised
slices such as diagonals), and so forth.

I'm thinking that a n-dim array could just be a list of lists (of lists of
lists of...) with the n-dim notation just being syntactic sugar (and perhaps
helping with optimisation too).

BTW, these kinds of issues are well suited to the perl6-language-data list:

  mailto:[email protected]

I suggest that we cover some 'internals' on that list as well as 'language',
since implementation efficiency is so fundamental in this area.