Shortcuts: A Critical Look

Marco and Franch describe[1,2] a data structure implementation called a “shortcut” which they use to reengineer the Weller/Wright implementation[3] of the Booch Components library[4,5]. In this article I discuss the shortcomings of that library, and compare it to another library called Charles[6] based on the C++ STL[7]. I also analyze the shortcuts framework and demonstrate that the problems with the Booch Components it tries to solve are best solved other ways.