Discussions related to Visual Prolog
Martin Meyer
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Posts: 328
Joined: 14 Nov 2002 0:01

Remove predicate

Unread post by Martin Meyer »

Hello Thomas and fellow users,

the implementation of the remove predicate in mapMSupport does not use the custom key comparison and its runtime is in O(n) (where -as usual- n denotes the number of elements in the collection):

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remove(T) :-     if T = site:getAll_nd() then         tuple(Key, _Value) = T,         site:removeKey(Key)     end if.
Therefor it could be replaced by

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remove(tuple(Key, _Value)) :-     site:removeKey(Key).
However it then still ignores the data part of the key/data-tuple, albeit the implementation of the contains predicate compares that part too:

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contains(tuple(Key, Value)) :-     Value = site:tryGet(Key).
Maybe the optimal solution would be, to introduce an additional custom data comparator, which defaults analogously to the custom key comparator to ::compare and use it in the remove and contains predicates.

Regards
Martin
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Thomas Linder Puls
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Posts: 1398
Joined: 28 Feb 2000 0:01

Unread post by Thomas Linder Puls »

Thank you.

The problem has already been solved for the next release.

Moving the solution back it looks like this:

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clauses     remove(tuple(Key, Value)) :-         if Value = site:tryGet(Key) then             site:removeKey(Key)         end if.
Adding a custom comparator for the @Data type seems to be overkill: because "goal" of maps lies in the keys. It is removeKey rather than remove that is the essential remove operation on a map.
Regards Thomas Linder Puls
PDC
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