I’m thinking functional style and, rather than ove...

# getting-started

[Ellen Spertus]

I’m thinking functional style and, rather than overwriting the current state of my object, a colleague suggested I append the latest state to a list, so I never overwrite/throw away information.

[Ellen Spertus]

t’s not necessary for correctness. He just thought it would be more elegant. I think I’ll just change the state for now. I can always create my own AppendOnlyList if I want to. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t overlooking a common data structure. (I’m new to Kotlin but not to programming. I’m thinking from a Scheme perspective without set!)

[Shawn]

you can definitely just + lists returned by listOf() and reassign to a var or return the new list within, say, a fold call

[Shawn]

the latter would be more scheme-like I’d think, but I’m no expert there

[Ellen Spertus]

I think I’ll stick with var. After all, it is in the language and is more efficient.

[Ellen Spertus]

Scheme-like would be to have only immutable lists and create a new list every time you want to add an element. Not the most efficient. 🐌

[Shawn]

for sure, you know your problem space better than we do

[Bob Glamm]

Creation of new lists is not necessarily any more inefficient than mutating an existing list

[Ellen Spertus]

Good point, because you can just point to the old list and not worry about its being changed. @Bob Glamm