andyferris / freeze.jl Goto Github PK

Continuing discussion JuliaArrays/StaticArrays.jl#745 (comment)

If you are going to think about these things remember that append-only datasets are a thing and that we might want eg a vector that supports push! but not setindex!.

Yes, exactly my thought. It'd be great if we can freeze/thaw push!-ability and setindex!-ability separately.

For dictionaries I was thinking isinsertable, freezekeys and thawkeys could be the (orthogonal) “shape” interface.

FYI, I'm using internal "trait" functions like implements(f!, T) and possible(f!, args...) in BangBang.jl as I don't want to keep introducing new trait functions. A similar approach could be useful if you want to distinguish append-only, FIFO, LIFO, etc. But maybe this kind of generality is not appropriate at this stage of design.

As for the naming, I think it'd be nice if "shape freezing/thawing" for vectors and dictionaries can be done with a same interface. I was thinking something like ismutablevalue and ismutableindex but I think "keys" instead of "index" is also fine since keys is implemented for arrays.