Re: STL like algorithms for Lua

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 3:16 AM, Pan Shi Zhu <pan.shizhu@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm, it would be much easier and cleaner to use STL algorithms in lua
> than in c++.

The Penlight seq library has some STL-like functions:

http://stevedonovan.github.com/Penlight/api/modules/pl.seq.html

But classic STL is built around the idea of generalized C++ pointers,
which is not so very applicable to Lua.

What style _is_ appropriate? We had a discussion recently about
standard forms of map and filter, etc. One idea is that these
functions would all take an _iterator_, rather than the table itself:

ls = map(myfun,ipairs(mytable))

But then the thought went, then the output should be an iterator as
well.  Which is fine, but then the simple & common case of applying a
function to a list starts looking a little overelaborate, which I
suppose is very much the STL tradition ;)

steve d.