Talk:Association list

This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Computer science This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computer science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Computer science related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Computer scienceWikipedia:WikiProject Computer scienceTemplate:WikiProject Computer scienceComputer science articles ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale. Things you can help WikiProject Computer science with: Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Article requests : Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Computer science, computing, and Internet Cleanup : Computer science articles needing attention Computer science articles needing expert attention Copyedit : Computing Expand : Computer science Infobox : Computer science articles without infoboxes Maintain : Timeline of computing 2020–present Photo : Find pictures for the biographies of computer scientists (see List of computer scientists) Computing articles needing images Stubs : Computer science stubs Unreferenced : WikiProject Computer science/Unreferenced BLPs Project-related : Tag all relevant articles in Category:Computer science and sub-categories with {{WikiProject Computer science}}

The artical begins almost immediately with a particular implementation of an associative list / association list. This should be **part** of a later section of the article.

The first section should identify WHAT such a list is. Next further clarify it by comparing and contrasting its features/properties with other list structures and data structures/fundamental types. Then identify the uses of such a list.

Finally, identify software systems for which associative lists are a foundation data type. and then elaborate on how they may be implemented.

The article says that associative lists are unusable/un-scalable. The fact is, this usability or lack thereof is solely a consequence of how they were implemented - not the features of the list itself. Cgarnant (talk) 20:34, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like you are looking for associative array, which describes a broad class of data structures with similar operations. This article is instead on a specific implementation of associative arrays. So it is entirely appropriate that it is focused on those implementation details and their implications for usage of this implementation method. It is also entirely appropriate that we have separate Wikipedia articles on the class of data structures and on this specific implementation within this class. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:42, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

actually not quite, since an array is a specific type of list, not the other way around.

Perhaps it would help if the context - i.e., 'what' (and in which 'universe', for example is this LISP, APL, Haskell-specific or ...) - were still first covered before the implementation.

It still seems weird to find 'associative list' directed to this article. Cgarnant (talk) 18:57, 13 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Re "an array is a specific type of list": Array (data structure) is a specific implementation of an ordered collection. But associative array is not about that. It is about dictionaries, key-value maps, whatever you want to call them, the abstraction for which this article here describes an implementation. The fact that it has "array" in the name should not confuse you into thinking that it must be implemented using arrays. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:11, 13 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]