[Development] Views

[Mutz, Marc]

On 2019-05-20 23:43, André Pönitz wrote:
> On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 11:23:13PM +0200, Mutz, Marc via Development 
> wrote:
>> On 2019-05-20 23:21, André Pönitz wrote:
>> > > > Exhibit A:
>> > > >
>> > > >      foo().contains(x)
>> > > >
>> > > >
>> > > > Exhibit B:
>> > > >
>> > > >      {
>> > > >          ... container = foo();
>> > > >          std::find(container.begin(), container.end(), x) !=
>> > > > container.end();
>> > > >      }
>> > >
>> > > And now do the same thing [...]
>> >
>> > No, I won't.
>> >
>> > You were claiming something universally valid (\forall x "There is
>> > no difference ...")
>> 
>> I never said that there's no difference. I said there's no difference 
>> in
>> readability. Don't confuse familiarity with simplicity (or 
>> readability).
> 
> Indeed, you claimed only "no difference in readability".
> 
> But I wouldn't agree that there is "no difference in readabilty" 
> between
> Exhibit A and B above.
> 
> In case B one e.g. would need to check whether all _four_ occurances of
> 'container' are actually the same. An issue that does not exist in case 
> A.

By that line of reasoning, the change from

    Q3Slider *sl = new Q3Slider(0, 100, 50, 10, 1, this);

to

    Q4Slider *sl = new Q4Slider(this);
    sl->setRange(0, 100);
    sl->setValue(50);
    sl->setPatheStep(10);
    sl->setStep(1);

was also wrong. I now need to check that the calls on the slider are 
always on the same object.

You are confusing familiarity with simplicity. It's simple that in the 
STL I can search for a value or a predicate condition at the change of 
just an '_if'. Container::contains(), OTOH, is just familiar (from 
previous Qt versions or other languages). It's neither simple in the 
sense that it would be universal (as find/find_if is) nor is it 
efficient: QVector<QString>::contains() is not overloaded on 
QLatin1String, e.g. Std::find(), OTOH, will transparently use the 
QLatin1String, avoiding the creation of a temporary QString. If 
contains() turns out to be a performance bottleneck in profiling, the 
user can't do anything about it and needs to go to the universal 
mechanism (std::find).

This does not make the API simple to use. Maybe for people coming from 
other languages. It introduces two different ways to do essentially the 
same thing, advocating the ways that only works in a particular 
corner-case and refusing to show the universal way 
(https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qvector.html#indexOf). But eventually, these 
developers _will_ need to search by a predicate, too, and then they will 
fall back to a raw loop, sometime, in the case of removing, introducing 
quadratic complexity. Had the Qt API and the docs not lied to them by 
permanently showing contains() without mentioning that it's but a 
short-cut for a corner-case, but shown them std::find or std::remove 
instead, the developer would have been empowered. As-is, 
Container::contains() dumbs the novice down by telling him a fairy-tale 
that isn't applicable to actual professional work.

Thanks,
Marc