[DGD] Re: Clones and very large arrays

[Par Winzell]

> Well like I said, I'm having difficulty making sense of it. The only 
> loop in the entire code will break as soon as it finds the first object 
> (the while() statement in forward()). And there isn't any recursion. So 
> I'm not sure how it is returning the entire list of clones.

An iterator is used as this:

   while (iterator->has_next()) {
     log("The next object is: " + iterator->next()->query_name());
   }

On each call to next(), the iterator should return the next object in 
the enumeration. It doesn't return an array or anything like that. It's 
an iterator the same way a for loop is an iterator -- it keeps an index 
of some kind internally, so that the code that uses it doesn't have to 
bother with such things.

>> Because it's inefficient to loop 250,000 times (or whatever OTABSZ is) 
>> to enumerate three objects.
> 
> That does seem inefficient, I'm wondering if it would be better to have 
> it loop by however many clones a master object happens to have (by 
> storing that information in an integer in the object daemon). But I'm 
> not sure, the instance number of a clone might exceed the number of 
> clones for that object, might it not?

Right -- in e.g. /base/obj/thing#283445, the number 283445 has nothing 
to do with how many clones of /base/obj/thing there are in the game. 
It's not "clone number 283445", it's "object number 283445, oh and it is 
also a clone of /base/obj/thing".

If you wanted, you could keep a global "this is the highest clone number 
we have seen yet" number, if you really wanted, or maybe one per 
clonable. In practice it's not that big a deal I think.

Zell
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