Understanding Data Ordering in Computer Programming: Why Truly Unordered Structures Don't Exist in Physical Systems
By
habedi0
Pulled from the oven a few minutes early. Edible, just barely.
Summary
The article discusses the concept of ordering in computer programming, arguing that truly unordered data structures like mathematical sets don't exist in physical computer systems. The author explains that all stored data has some form of ordering, whether through memory addresses, storage maps, or other mechanisms, even if that ordering isn't useful for the programmer's purposes. The context suggests this is related to a 'Show HN' post about 'Ordered', a sorted collection library for the Zig programming language.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledBeing truly unordered like a set is not something you can do in a physical computer program unlike a mathematical abstraction.
Anything stored is 'ordered' in some way, either explicitly by virtual (or physical) memory addresses or implicitly by some kind of storage map equation.
It just might not be a useful ordering. (I.e., you may have to loop and compare.)
One might qualify such as 'system-ordered', or in the Python insert-ordered dict, qualify with 'insertion-ordered', though hash tables in general are sort of a melange of hash-ordering.
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