On Wed, 28 Aug 2019 at 07:18, Andrew Tomazos via Lib-Ext
<lib-ext@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:
>
> I think modelling a path as a container of its components is reasonable.
>
> What isn't reasonable is that those components are themselves paths, as this would imply that the value of a single-component path P is a container of one item, and that one item contained in P has the value P. A container shouldn't be able to contain itself. It's nonsensical.
It's perfectly sensical for hierarchical things
Consider:
struct Tree {
std::vector<Tree> children;
};
bool operator==(const Tree& a, const Tree& b) {
return a.children == b.children;
}
Here we have a type that is a container of itself. A hierarchy.
However, there is no *value* of type Tree such that:
*this == this->children[0]
I would argue hierarchy alone is not a sufficient motivation to have a self-referential model such that a *value* can be a container holding itself.
You would need to be modelling something that needs a cyclic directed graph - but even then we don't often think of a graph node as being a "container" of its outbound edges.