[DGD] Re: Clones and very large arrays

[Robert Forshaw]

>From: Par Winzell <zell at skotos.net>
>>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.

I see; I read up "iterator" on everything2.com, but I had trouble placing 
how it would work. So I took the (wrong) assumption that it was some kind of 
loop. Thanks for straightening that out.

>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".

There goes another one of my wrongly mis-held assumptions. Now things make 
more sense!

>
>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.

I would still imagine that enumerating a mapping-of-mappings would be 
quicker than a few hundred-thousand loops, but in practice... well, I 
haven't had any yet.

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