Conceptually, what is the difference between a Sequence and a Sorted Container? Answer: The fact that you specify the order of a sequence, while the sorted container decides on its own where to put things. Its a bit of a simplification, but overall I think that really sums it up.

With that in mind, having Insert(i, x) being defined for a Sorted Container simply doesn't make sense. More importantly, expecting a function that relies on Insert(i, x) to work properly on both Sequences and Sorted Containers doesn't make sense.

So, this is the final breakdown I have decided on:

Container -> ErasableContainer -> ISequence -> IRandomAccessSequence                               -> IBackSequence                               -> IFrontSequence                               -> ISortedContainer

Unfortunately, this makes for a system that is rather verbose. List, for instance, is an ErasableContainer, an ISequence, an IBackSequence, and an IFrontSequence all at once. Vector is slightly better, being an ErasableContainer, an IRandomAccessSequence, and an IBackSequence. Stack would simply be a Container, but it would accept an IBackSequence as a parameter.

This is what I meant when I said a couple posts back that the hardest part of working with Containers is figuring out what to inherit from. At some point, I would like to sit down and see if I can't come up with something a little less clunky by dropping the STL association. But I doubt I will.

Once I have actually finished making these changes [they aren't substantially different from what I had originally], I think I'll go ahead and publish a version 0.1. I'll be leaving out all the SortedContainers, because they're in a rather broken state, but I do have both List and Vector, as well as quite a few standard algorithms. So there's still plenty to laugh at.

Until next time.

CM