Tcl Source Code

This definitely belongs to abstract-lists implementation of 9.0 and although it was supposed to be better (avoid shimmer of dict to list), in the reality it is rather worse now:

- list facilities previously handles pure-dicts better (even if it shimmered sometimes between list/dict).
- by retrieving of length (DictAsListLength) now it always obtain string representation of dict (also for pure-dict object), what:
   * may be slow and 
   * causes that dict object is not pure anymore (basically we need a flag for that, to mark pure-dicts independently to existence of its string representation)
- DictAsListLength (but basically ObjType::LengthProc) cannot handle errors, what may be not so good for a possible fallback (if dict is not pure dict);
- retrieving of index (if one would implement it for dict), e. g. for INST_FOREACH_STEP/INST_FOREACH_START instructions, is hardly possible, because
normal iteration over the dict needs some interim Tcl_DictSearch (or similar iterator handle), and without that we'll get O(n!) aka factorial big-O if it'd always start from scratch and stop at index.
- ObjType::GetElements may be too hard (for large dicts) and it is unused, and rightly so, for INST_FOREACH_STEP/INST_FOREACH_FIRST instructions.
- there is no ObjType::Iterate facility.

All that makes difficult to implement it with reasonable performance for all corner cases. However I'll take a closer look to this later.