It's not really a matrix of strings, is it?

# advent-of-code

[Nir]

It's not really a matrix of strings, is it?

[asad.awadia]

the map is a matrix of chars - is it not?

[Nir]

Well, you said strings before

[Nir]

string's pretty inefficient because it's a bigger/heavier type, I'm not sure what char is like exactly in Kotlin

[Nir]

but Boolean is the best choice, there's only two values you care about

[Nir]

Boolean or an enum class with two values, is probably a little better

[adamratzman]

You still need to convert each char to a boolean, so the total amount of char comparisons you’d make converting to boolean vs keeping as chars is the same

[Nir]

well not in the second part right

[Nir]

I mean I guess technically you can end up doing more char comparisons because you are "eagerly" converting everything, you can also do fewer in the second part

[Nir]

I mostly say Boolean is the better choice for semantic reasons though not performance reasons. There's only two values you care about, so you should opt to convert stuff early into a type that only has two values.

[Michael de Kaste]

Meh, the stuff is read-only so I prefer just going with a list of strings since accessing a spot is just list[y][x] syntax.

[Nir]

Whether it's a List[String] or a List[List[Boolean]], it's still [y][x] syntax

[Michael de Kaste]

Yes, thats why imho it was better to just to .lines() on the input file content instead of reading and mapping to booleans based on whatever you encounter

[Michael de Kaste]

Dont get me wrong

[adamratzman]

agree with michael

[Nir]

Eh, you have a type system, use it to help you

[Nir]

This is fairly toy code so it doesn't matter much either way

[Nir]

But in real code continuing to pass around chars all over your program when there's only two "legal" values is just bad

[adamratzman]

Right

[Michael de Kaste]

Ohno, I agree with that. Luckily adventofcode guaranteea correct semantics on input.

Normally I'd treat the problem differently