[Swift-devel] Re: Criteria for rollout

[Ben Clifford]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Mihael Hategan wrote:

> > I think the correct behaviour should be to output in the order of the 
> > array indices (for both plain array passing and for @filenames).
> 
> So I think sorting in all cases (i.e. getFringePaths()) isn't necessary.
> Not sorting is faster.
> 
> So a simple solution would be to sort those paths right in
> leavesFileNames(). In the particular case of an array, it will achieve
> the desired result. In other cases (i.e. more complex data types) it
> would result in some form of order, not particularily worse than no
> order. Make sense?

Sorting only needs to happen when the arrays get serialised in some 
place that is significant.

At the moment, I think the only place for that is @filename and 
@filenames.

So leavesFileNames would be an ok place to do it.

A more complicated-to-implement approach would be to sort out the return 
type of @filenames (it doesn't have one at the moment that fits in the 
Swift data model) so that it returns a Swift-style array of strings rather 
than a Java array of strings; and then have the sorting happening at the 
point that the swift-style array of strings is serialised (whether its a 
Swift array coming out of @filenames or a swift array coming from 
somewhere else). That's something that I want to do to tidy up the 
language some anyway; but don't let that hold up implementation of a 
leavesFileNames sorting fix.

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