Doubtless the original poster expected aBag asDictionary to answer a dictionary mapping the (distinct) elements of the bag to their counts. Mathematically, a bag can usefully be seen as a partial function from a set U to the positive integers, and a dictionary with U keys and positive integer values is precisely that.
It's really not unreasonable to expect that, considering that there *is* a method that does just what the OP wanted: #valuesAndCounts. It's rather dangerous to expose private state like that, but it is not a private method. I would expect asDictionary ^contents copy On Thu, 7 Mar 2019 at 02:54, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote: > Why would that work ? What would you expect the output to be ? > > Try: > > #(1 2 3) asDictionary > > it fails in exactly the same way. You need key/value pairs (Associations). > > These do work > > Bag new add: #foo->100; asDictionary. > > Bag new addAll: 'ABABABAAAA'; valuesAndCounts. > > > On 6 Mar 2019, at 14:25, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote: > > > > I was surprised to find that a Bag can’t convert to a dictionary - e.g. > > > > Bag new > > addAll: 'aabbbbcddd’; > > asDictionary > > > > Gives an error - Dnu #key > > > > > > It looks to me like Bag is inheriting a bad version of #associationsDo: > and instead could simply forward it to #doWithOccurences: instead? > > > > I know Bag is not used that much - but it comes up a lot in programming > exercises. > > > > Tim > > >
