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I asked this question in CodeReview and I was informed that I could find better answers in the SoftwareEngineering community. But, just to make sure, would the question be within the scope of the site?


I ended up posting the question in softwareengineering.stackexchange. It wasn't particularly well received. So, in addition to the question relating to the scope, I'd also like to know what is it that it lacks or how it can be improved.

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Questions asking for "better ways" are very often not well received by our community. You find some of the reasons here, in this meta post from 2019 "Why questions about "the correct way" are too broad".

When one tries to ask such a question either, one has to care for two things:

  • a clear, measurable criteria what "better" should mean

  • a convincing argument that the chosen criteria are "the right ones" for achieving a certain goal (and not part of an XY problem.)

Specifically when it comes to performance and/or space efficiency: those are never an end in itself, only a means to an end. When askers state those things as a criterion for "better", they should present their results of performance or space measurements (or at least a serious estimation) and explain why those results don't meet their requirements.

Otherwise, the community here will typically assume the asker has set their priorities wrong (and IMHO that asessment is likely to be correct).

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  • In my case "better" was in reference to the two ways by which I represented the entities in question. So, a better way would be one that requires less memory compared to the representations that I provided. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is not vague or unclear. Jan 30 at 20:38
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    No, it is not unclear, but it lacks a clear argument why that is of any importance for your problem of writing a correctly working compiler. "Just for curiosity" does not count.
    – Doc Brown
    Jan 30 at 20:41

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