Re: Microlight

[Jay Carlson <nop@...>]

On Dec 20, 2012, at 11:02 AM, Philipp Janda wrote:

> And collect/icollect ([1], slightly altered) are actually surprisingly interesting:
> 
>    icollect( {}, 1, pairs( t ) )        --> keys( t )
>    icollect( {}, 2, pairs( t ) )        --> values( t )
>    icollect( {}, 2, ipairs( t ) )       --> shallow_arraycopy( t )
>    icollect( {}, 1, io.lines( fname ) ) --> my @lines = <FILE>;
>    icollect( t1, 2, ipairs( t2 ) )      --> append( t1, t2 )
> 
>    collect( {}, 1, 2, pairs( t ) )  --> shallow_tablecopy( t )
>    collect( {}, 1, 2, ipairs( t ) ) --> shallow_arraycopy( t )
>    collect( {}, 2, 1, ipairs( t ) ) --> invert( t ), makeset( t )
>    collect( t1, 1, 2, pairs( t2 ) ) --> extend( t1, t2 )

I really like this, but I hate numbers. Consider a function swap():

   swap(1, 2) 
     -> return 2, 1
   swap(1, 2, 3)
     -> return 2, 1, 3
   swap(1, nil) 
     -> return nil, 1

   -- I'm ultra-paranoid. Would you ever want this to work?
   swap(1)
     -> error()

I thought it was a shame you can't write a no-memory iterator that applies swap() to another iterator's stepping. (You can't because the "next step" function is only called with *first* value it previously returned.) It'd look like a function swap()ing its arguments and its return values.

Perhaps a wrapper calling "swap" per step could be called swaps()--it fits with pairs() and ipairs().

That way those examples could become

  icollect({}, pairs( t ) ) -> keys(t)
  icollect({}, swaps( pairs( t ) )) -> values(t)

  collect({}, swaps( ipairs( t ) )) -> invert/Set(t)

As a technical matter it would be easy to change the generic-for implementation to pass in two values, and of course we can do whatever we want with collect and icollect.

But after having gone through all that, icollect_2nd() and collect_2nd() would be even easier. swaps() seems like it has very limited utility in the generic-for.

icollect_n and collect_n are a really nice general case.

...but after all that theory I'm reluctantly walking back to "but would I actually use that with that name". I could write something like table.values(t) but probably just admire icollect_2nd({}, pairs(t)) from afar. 

inject_into({}, t) and invert_into({}, t) (whatever their names) are the big ones for me.