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Thanks for sharing that link. I found it quite an interesting read. (I much prefer Swift to ObjC after a conversion of about 10k lines in an iOS app). C style

Thanks for sharing that link. I found it quite an interesting read. (I much prefer Swift to ObjC after a conversion of about 10k lines in an iOS app). C style for loops come pretty early in most programming tutorials, but I wonder how much non-C programming does actually use them nowadays (from the Community Responses, it seems not much Swift courtesy of other options). Usually, a C style for would be to loop over an array, and a safer way to do that probably could have stopped countless vulnerabilities & bugs occurring over the years.

masklinn 9y ago
> C style for loops come pretty early in most programming tutorials Meh. Many languages don't have c-style for loops in the first place. Neither Python nor Ruby do for instance. I don't think Rust ever had them either[0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_a_c_style_for_loop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_...
- andybak 9y ago
  I agree. Looping over a numeric sequence is simply a specific case of looping over any collection. A language should reflect this. It feels so natural to write: for thing in collection: process(thing) and very easy to move from that to a functional style: map(collection, process) or collection.map(process) The number of times I also need a integer counter is fairly small.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    result := collection collect:[ :a | a process ]. result := collection collect process. collection do process. 1 to: 10 do: [ :i | stdout println:i ]. stdout do println: (1 to: 10). All just plain messages and plain message syntax, no special control structures needed.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    When you do need an integer counter, the best way to have it is to create a new collection consisting of (index, element) pairs. Swift (and many other languages) make this easy: for (index, element) in collection.enumerated() There are some cases where the C style for loop is the most natural way to express something. For example, looping over NULL-terminated array of pointers is nicely expressed with one (Swift 2-ish pseudocode): for var cursor = ptr; cursor.pointee != nil; cursor += 1 But these situations are really rare, and when you do encounter them, it's not a big deal to transform them into a while loop: var cursor = ptr while cursor.pointee != nil { defer { cursor += 1 } ...do stuff... }
    - masklinn 9y ago
      And you can trivially package the process into an iterator anyway if it's a case you encounter often.
- andybak 9y ago
  I agree. Looping over a numeric sequence is simply a specific case of looping over any collection. A language should reflect this. It feels so natural to write: for thing in collection: process(thing) and very easy to move from that to a functional style: map(collection, process) The number of times I also need a integer counter is fairly small.

masklinn 9y ago

> C style for loops come pretty early in most programming tutorials Meh. Many languages don't have c-style for loops in the first place. Neither Python nor Ruby do for instance. I don't think Rust ever had them either[0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_a_c_style_for_loop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_...

andybak 9y ago
I agree. Looping over a numeric sequence is simply a specific case of looping over any collection. A language should reflect this. It feels so natural to write: for thing in collection: process(thing) and very easy to move from that to a functional style: map(collection, process) or collection.map(process) The number of times I also need a integer counter is fairly small.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  result := collection collect:[ :a | a process ]. result := collection collect process. collection do process. 1 to: 10 do: [ :i | stdout println:i ]. stdout do println: (1 to: 10). All just plain messages and plain message syntax, no special control structures needed.
- mikeash 9y ago
  When you do need an integer counter, the best way to have it is to create a new collection consisting of (index, element) pairs. Swift (and many other languages) make this easy: for (index, element) in collection.enumerated() There are some cases where the C style for loop is the most natural way to express something. For example, looping over NULL-terminated array of pointers is nicely expressed with one (Swift 2-ish pseudocode): for var cursor = ptr; cursor.pointee != nil; cursor += 1 But these situations are really rare, and when you do encounter them, it's not a big deal to transform them into a while loop: var cursor = ptr while cursor.pointee != nil { defer { cursor += 1 } ...do stuff... }
  - masklinn 9y ago
    And you can trivially package the process into an iterator anyway if it's a case you encounter often.
andybak 9y ago
I agree. Looping over a numeric sequence is simply a specific case of looping over any collection. A language should reflect this. It feels so natural to write: for thing in collection: process(thing) and very easy to move from that to a functional style: map(collection, process) The number of times I also need a integer counter is fairly small.