I'm asking here rather than on SO/SE/CS because I'll probably have less to explain what I'm talking about...
I hope a lot of the users here are familiar with how many games implement modding (or sometimes even their own add-ons, levels etc.) Conceptually, what I've seen most often is a data structure that acts like a layered dictionary. With no mods, there's lookup in the base dictionary layer; whenever a mod is added/enabled, it comes with its own dictionary layer from which lookups are served first, with fallback to the underlying layers if a key is not found. (Note that I'm not talking about a nested dictionary.)
So, my question is simply if there's a generic name for this data structure. (Googling for "layered dictionary", which is how I dubbed it, doesn't turn up anything useful...) In the world of file systems, the closest thing that probably resembles it is a union mount. Alas "union dictionary" doesn't get any useful results either... (Also the word "union" is rather misleading in this context because there's an order in the layers of a "union mount".)
Added: By the way, I'm not asing how to implement it, as that's rather obvious from the description. Perhaps that's why no name have been devised for it... Also most game engines I've seen implement multi-layer (not just two) and some allow the (top) layers to be removed at any time so you can do (game) "levels" that way; others require an engine restart so it's only usable for "global mods", i.e. they optimize lookup time by "flattening" the layers down to one as they are added, which is basically why they need an "engine restart" to remove a layer.
Also, it seems the R (statistical) programming language basically has this its get
functions:
These functions look to see if each of the name(s)
x
have a value bound to it in the specified environment. Ifinherits
is TRUE and a value is not found forx
in the specified environment, the enclosing frames of the environment are searched until the namex
is encountered.
So I guess something like "environments and their enclosures" is one term...