I haven't really thought too much about what it'd look like, but it'd be nice to have classes (maybe this is already in, I need to scan the spec again) that could handle the various perldsc cases

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<br><a target="_new" href="http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perldsc.html">http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perldsc.html</a>

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<br>Like foo[0][&quot;index&quot;] or bar[&quot;whee&quot;][8] or baz[&quot;abc&quot;][&quot;def&quot;] - List&lt;List&lt;T&gt;&gt; works fine for giving you expandable jagged 2-d arrays, and Dictionary&lt;string, Dictionary&lt;string, int&gt;&gt; and friends are certainly available, but I wonder whether we could provide more perl-ish versions (if we chose to) that would auto-expand the structures as necessary and auto-add values - doing so such that the following code would actually run just fine.

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<br>            List&lt;List&lt;int&gt;&gt; list = new List&lt;List&lt;int&gt;&gt;();

<br>            Dictionary&lt;string, Dictionary&lt;string, int&gt;&gt; dict = new Dictionary&lt;string, Dictionary&lt;string, int&gt;&gt;();

<br>            list[3][4] = 7;

<br>            dict[&quot;foo&quot;][&quot;bar&quot;] = 8;

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<br>Especially for 2 and higher dimensional collections, there could be a lot of value in the developer not having to cascade down the allocations manually.

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<br>Just a thought - being able to easily read/write such multi-dimensional collections made a lot of problems easier to code in Perl, and it'd be nice if Power Collections could potentially bring something along those lines to C# 2.0 :)

The syntax isn't fantastic, but rather than using a Dictionary of Dictionaries, it's going to be a lot more efficient to simply using a Dictionary with a Pair type as the key. For example:

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<br>Dictionary&lt;Pair&lt;string,string&gt;, int&gt; dict = new Dictionary&lt;Pair&lt;string,string&gt;, int&gt;;

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<br>dict[new Pair&lt;string,string&gt;(&quot;foo&quot;, &quot;bar&quot;)] = 8;

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<br>Of course, having to type &quot;new Pair&lt;string,string&gt;&quot; all the time does make this approach seem rather tedious.

Kudos for this whole project: having complete collections for .NET is great, and a novel class like BigList is especially cool.

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<br>The Qt library has a free implementation of STL-like containers, and its source code is way more readable than the STL's; it may be worth a look.  Some of the interesting hacks:

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<br>- To make up for slow indexed lookup in linked lists, QLinkedList caches the location of the most recently looked-up item.  If you look up l[10] and then l[11], QLinkedList will just traverse one node of the list for the second lookup.  BigList may be able to take advantage of this idea.

<br>- Entire containers are copy-on-write for performance (i.e., copying is O(1) if you don't modify the original or the copy).

<br>- Its main list class is actually implemented as a deque of object references.

<br>- It includes a multimap class like the STL's, and its documentation includes complexity specifications.

<br>- Its templates are designed to minimize the amount of code expansion.

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<br>Many of the hacks don't make sense in a managed context, but I figure it can't hurt to toss you the name.

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<br><a target="_new" href="http://ftp.silug.org/mirrors/ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/qt-mac-opensource-4.0.0-b1.tar.gz">http://ftp.silug.org/mirrors/ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/qt-mac-opensource-4.0.0-b1.tar.gz</a>

<br><a target="_new" href="http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/containers.html">http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/containers.html</a>