On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 03:26:14AM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> Premature optimization is the root of all evil, as they say. As
> such, I consider any suggestion that this abominable form would
> increase its value by adding "optimization" ... questionable. At
> best. Suggesting that it's necessary/useful for large hashes is
> questionable as hash lookups are supposed to be O(1) in any case.

Hash lookups using a hash value are O(1).  However, calculating the hash
value need not be an O(1) operation.  This is why it is sometimes more
efficient to use trees instead of hashes; with a tree, there is no need
to calculate a hash value.

I'm not advocating the RCR, of course.  I do not dislike the idea of
references-to-references, but adding them to Ruby is non-trivial and
unnecessary, given that we have other mechanisms (such as bindings) that
perform similar functions.

Paul