VI.0.2.2 Associative containers and Arrays

By default, COM does not define associative containers (i.e. containers that associate keys and values, like the “Hash” class of ruby language.) As in FeResPost ruby extension, Hash objects are often used as method arguments, or values returned by these methods, A convention must be agreed upon to determine the type of arguments that are to be used to replace these Hashes.

The convention that has been adopted is that each Hash is replaced by a 2D Array:

• The first index range for this array corresponds to the number of key-value pairs of the corresponding Hash argument.
• The second index ranges from 0 to 1 (two values). The value 0 corresponds to the key and the value 1 corresponds to the value of the pair.

One notes that the indices used to access the elements of an Array start with 0 corresponding to the first element. This is a convention that has systematically been used for all the Array produced by FeResPost COM component. This convention is that same as the one of FeResPost ruby extension, and is consistent with C, C++, ruby and many other programming languages.