I had a bit of trouble fully understanding the EAV concept or the pldb 
code.  There's not a good overview of EAV architecture that doesn't focus 
on databases.  I'm not much of a DB guy.  So, I'm not sure if I got the 
essence of the EAV pattern with my new implementation, but here it is 
anyway:

I think the legacy of object-orientation was so embedded in my brain that I 
failed to see the simple solution: rows and columns.  I was thinking of 
items in the map as "containers" of items, when I could have been thinking 
of them as rows in a table.  The table is effectively a sparse matrix.

The implementation's main map is of type { [row col]->Item }.  It also uses 
two other maps: row-idx:{row->{col item}} and col-idx:{col->{row->item}}.

Whenever an assoc occurs on key [r c] and item i, here is how the values 
are updated:
main-map<-(assoc main-map [r c] i)
row-idx<-(assoc-in row-idx [r c] i)
col-idx<-(assoc-in col-idx [c r] i)

This way, we efficiently maintain row-idx and col-idx, two complementary 
nested maps that mirror each others' structure.

Did I get close to the EAV pattern here?  Also, I wonder if this approach 
is scalable to higher-dimensional tables, for instance where each item is 
associated with a 3-tuple.

On Monday, 18 April 2016 17:18:45 UTC-7, tbc++ wrote:
>
> Core.logic has one such implementation: 
> https://github.com/clojure/core.logic/blob/master/src/main/clojure/clojure/core/logic/pldb.clj
>  
> <https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fclojure%2Fcore.logic%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2Fsrc%2Fmain%2Fclojure%2Fclojure%2Fcore%2Flogic%2Fpldb.clj&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGjJWdatQscPmDIx3xpBMuwPmOH7A>
>  
> might be a place to start. 
>
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 5:35 PM, JvJ <kfjwh...@gmail.com <javascript:>> 
> wrote:
>
>> Can you point me to a working example of one of these structures?
>>
>> On Monday, 18 April 2016 16:30:17 UTC-7, tbc++ wrote:
>>>
>>> And by "fairly common these days", I mean that I run into this sort of 
>>> structure a lot in clojure with anything that is trying to logic or query 
>>> operations. Probably isn't that common outside of projects in that domain. 
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Timothy Baldridge <tbald...@gmail.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> assoc-in is defined in terms of assoc: 
>>>> https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/clojure-1.7.0/src/clj/clojure/core.clj#L5901
>>>>
>>>> And this structure is fairly common these days, it's basically a index 
>>>> of tuples [e a v], and you're creating a eav index and then an av index. 
>>>> Datomic does this same sort of thing, for the datom [e a v t] it creates 
>>>> indices for :eavt :avet and a few others that escape my memory at the 
>>>> moment.  
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 5:08 PM, JvJ <kfjwh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm implementing a map data structure where most of the values are 
>>>>> maps or sets, and these values can be cross-indexed by the keys they 
>>>>> contain.  I don't know if it already has a name, but I'm calling it a 
>>>>> cross-map.  It's similar to a two-way map, but they're not the same thing.
>>>>>
>>>>> For instance, a common operation would be something like "give me all 
>>>>> values of this map that contain the key :a."
>>>>>
>>>>> In order to do this efficiently, I'm maintaining a second map that 
>>>>> maps keys in the values of the main map to keys of the main map whose 
>>>>> values contain that key.
>>>>>
>>>>> If that sounds confusing, consider this:
>>>>> main-map:
>>>>> {:foo {:a 1 :b 2} :bar {:a 2 :c 4} :baz {:b 3 :c 5}}
>>>>>
>>>>> Corresponding cross-indices:
>>>>> {:a #{:foo :bar} :b #{:foo :baz} :c #{:bar :baz}}
>>>>>
>>>>> As you can see, each key maintains references to those entries where 
>>>>> it is found.
>>>>>
>>>>> When a nested update occurs that adds an entry to one of the main 
>>>>> map's values, the efficient thing to do would be to simply conj that new 
>>>>> key onto its corresponding cross-index set.
>>>>>
>>>>> However, I am trying to implement this as a clojure IPersistentMap, 
>>>>> and the only method I can override is assoc, not assoc-in.
>>>>>
>>>>> Using regular assoc, I would have to compare the old value's keys to 
>>>>> the new value's keys and find the set difference of the two, which is not 
>>>>> an O(1) operation.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there any way to override the behaviour of nested associations or 
>>>>> updates?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was 
>>>> that–lacking zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of 
>>>> their C programs.”
>>>> (Robert Firth) 
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking 
>>> zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C 
>>> programs.”
>>> (Robert Firth) 
>>>
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>
>
>
> -- 
> “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking 
> zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C 
> programs.”
> (Robert Firth) 
>

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