4 ms·
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:
by 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 agoresult := 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 agoWhen 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 agoAnd you can trivially package the process into an iterator anyway if it's a case you encounter often.