Learning Go

It's fun learning a new language. My classes are keeping me very busy so I haven't been able to put much time into my B-tree project. I have, however, had time to bend my mind around getting things done the Go way. That means getting out from underneath the the Object Oriented model. Do you every find yourself saying, "What accessors will I need?" or "How do I give this object access to that thingy over there?" 

That's how you know you're objectifying your code. Treating your code like an object is just as serious. You wouldn't objectify your cat would you? Let's face it your code is much more important than kitty. 

So here's my progress. B-trees require quirky data structures. Each node contains two lists. One list of indexes along with pointers to records and another list of node pointers. B-trees also have three different kinds of nodes, root, inner and leaf nodes. This kind of polymorphism can cause fits for the OO programmers. Here's how I've done it:

type Pair struct {

Key int

Value interface{}

}

type Node struct {

Values [] Pair

Nodes [] *Node

}

I created a type called Pair so that I could hold the index and node pointers together. If you're wondering what interface{} means it seems to be the way that you can do something like void * in Go. Since every struct implements the empty interface you can put anything there. That's necessary because I want my B-tree structure to be able to hold arbitrary data. 

I was able to use a single struct for all three types of nodes. In all nodes I allocate space for Pairs but I only allocate node pointers on root and leaf nodes.