Implementation of association class?

[Martin R-L]

Implementation of association class?

I'd like some views on best practises for implementing association classes
in OOPL code.

Regards,
// Martin R-L

[panu]

Martin R-L wrote:

>I'd like some views on best practises for implementing association classes
> in OOPL code.

Interestingly Smalltalk already has a class called Association.

This has two fields 'key' and 'value'. Associations can be
combined to form a Dictionary (a hash-table) which allows
you to access the values by the key.

If you want bi-directional associations, I would simply
add methods for creating and returning the reverse
dictionary, possibly with caching if the dictionaries
are big.

-Panu Viljamaa