[Grace-core] collections interface for new classes

[James Noble]

>> 1. take the varargs versions back to single elements,
>> leave the “All” versions taking collections
>> 
>>> c.add “x”
>>> c.addFirst “x” 
>>> c.addLast “x” 
>>> 
>>> c.addAll [ “x”, “y” ] 
>>> c.addAllFirst [ “x”, “y” ] 
> 
> Yes, this is what we should do.

Ok 

>> * amg (Andrew’s minigrace) has a few methods in the AST and parser

> I inherited two of these from Michael.  They should be removed and replaced by methods with meaningful names.  I added method new(*values) scope(s)  so that I could initialize the scope argument and then forward to one t=of the others; this was me being lazy.

sounds like this isn’t important. whether you update them or not is up to you:
I guess it depends whether you think it’s work moving mg to what I think of as the “0.8” language or not
(no super, no varargs, etc) 
actually with only a few varargs mehtods & only 45? super calls modifying the code to run on 0.8 may not be too hard.
modifying mg to compile 0.8 may be harder…

>> PPS if we’re allowed “min” and “max” surely we are allowed “seq” as well?
>> 
>> PPPS if we add “min” and “max” into collections, there’s average, and sum, and … 
>> although here I think I’d be very happy to have a trait that mixed this in to the collections library elsewhere
> 
> The problem with min and max is that these work only for total orders, and not all collections have total orders.   Smalltalk leaves this up to the programmer.  Is there a stringily-typed solution that is as convenient, but more foolproof?

well I wondered about some kind of method guards 

class list<T> { 
  method max where T <: Numeric { …
    //can assume T is numberic or something

but it seems a bit “Haskell” to me

> (Addition on strings is spelled ++, while addition on numbers is spelled +.  

I guess that is something else we could look at… 

>> 
>> PS andrew - which is the best current version of collections to work on? 
> 
> I just checked-in a new version to apblack/minigrace, and have just this minute push it to gracelang/minigrace ( I was waiting for the Travis tests to run green.)

OK I think I’m looking at gracelang/minigrace, ../collectionsPrelude, and e.g. …/modules

I presume you’re happy for me to look at this - doing (rough) - kernan versions
rather than take that on yourself?  if you’d rather do it, that’s fine by me and I
can do other stuff

J