Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway4good 1917 days ago
And what is the relationship between tuple, list, and array?

https://www.yuque.com/boyan-avfmj/aviatorscript/ban32m

1 comments

tuple is a fixed-size array

array is a java array

list is a sequence which are java Collections (Set/Map/List)

Yeah - I figured it would be related to interopt with the Java runtime.

However it is a bit sad, language designers never seem to bother cleaning up collection types when designing a new language.

There really should be just one list type.

Agree with array/list, we don't need more contiguous chunks of memory, but tuples are very different, if only because they allow elements of different types. They're really more ad-hoc unnamed structs than collections.
in strictly typed languages that would be correct, and I still somewhat agree, but AviatorScript is dynamically typed, and allows lists containing elements with different types. It's basically List<Object>. So it seems to be a strictly semantic distinction.