D - cursors
- Sean L. Palmer (16/16) Sep 22 2003 What do you guys think about having a kind of guided for-each loop, wher...
- Benji Smith (15/15) Sep 22 2003 I like the idea of being able to page through the objects in a collectio...
- Ant (9/12) Sep 22 2003 I'm sorry but I have to show my ignorance...
- Sean L. Palmer (7/20) Sep 23 2003 It probably is too high level for the core language... I was just wonder...
- Hauke Duden (8/19) Sep 23 2003 My intuition is that this should be done using a wrapper iterator object...
- Walter (4/10) Sep 23 2003 Yes. In fact, I have an example somewhere that shows how you can use thi...
- Sean L. Palmer (9/14) Sep 24 2003 to
- Hauke Duden (19/24) Sep 24 2003 Well, the obvious solution would be that the Tree itself provides the
- Walter (4/6) Sep 23 2003 Yes, it is!
What do you guys think about having a kind of guided for-each loop, where the iterator can provide different ways you can go from current, and a parameter to the foreach loop decides which branch to take every iteration? You could iterate trees; you could plug in different algorithms like depth-first or breadth-first walks. You would need some kind of switch inside to decide which path to take. And maybe it shouldn't be called foreach but maybe rather some kind of guided loop, that doesn't necessarily iterate over the entire container but rather follows a path, kind of like a search. You could write a linear first to last traversal pretty easily. Any ideas what this might look like in D? I think we are going to need something more flexible than foreach, and bidirectional or unidirectional iteration. Then again the apply() function might already be capable of this? Interesting... You could certainly make a kind of iterator adapter class. Sean
Sep 22 2003
Benji Smith <dlanguage xxagg.com> I like the idea of being able to page through the objects in a collection using different algorithms. Particularly, I think it's useful to be able to choose depth-first or bredth-first traversals for trees (I'm actually thinking specifically about xml documents). And I like the idea of being able to use a foreach construct to do the iterating. But I don't think it warrants a specific language feature. I think it would be more appropriate to create a templated Cursor class that could be instantiated with 1) the type of class to be iterated over, and 2) the type of algorithm to use inside of the iteration. The templated class would have an apply function for each of the different algorithms. [NOTE: I'm not sure if you can use template syntax to decide which version of a function to use inside of a class. And I'm pretty sure you can't have more than one apply() function, so you might have to create a different template for each algorithm that you might want to instantiate.] --Benji Smith
Sep 22 2003
In article <bkom9h$2018$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Sean L. Palmer says...What do you guys think about having a kind of guided for-each loop, where the iterator can provide different ways you can go from current, [...]I'm sorry but I have to show my ignorance... Should this kind of cursor be implemented at the language level? Can't you make some decisions in a while(){} cycle? Are there examples of other languages with these complex cursors? this idea is completly new to me... When do we (Walter) decide that some feature is too high level for a language? Ant
Sep 22 2003
It probably is too high level for the core language... I was just wondering if that, since it doesn't really appear to fit under foreach, might warrant some new kind of language construct.. But yeah, I guess good old while will work. Sean "Ant" <Ant_member pathlink.com> wrote in message news:bkonvm$22b0$1 digitaldaemon.com...In article <bkom9h$2018$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Sean L. Palmer says...What do you guys think about having a kind of guided for-each loop, where the iterator can provide different ways you can go from current, [...]I'm sorry but I have to show my ignorance... Should this kind of cursor be implemented at the language level? Can't you make some decisions in a while(){} cycle? Are there examples of other languages with these complex cursors? this idea is completly new to me... When do we (Walter) decide that some feature is too high level for a language? Ant
Sep 23 2003
Sean L. Palmer wrote:What do you guys think about having a kind of guided for-each loop, where the iterator can provide different ways you can go from current, and a parameter to the foreach loop decides which branch to take every iteration? You could iterate trees; you could plug in different algorithms like depth-first or breadth-first walks. You would need some kind of switch inside to decide which path to take. And maybe it shouldn't be called foreach but maybe rather some kind of guided loop, that doesn't necessarily iterate over the entire container but rather follows a path, kind of like a search. You could write a linear first to last traversal pretty easily.My intuition is that this should be done using a wrapper iterator object. Something like this: foreach(TreeElement el ; new DepthFirstTreeIterator(someTree)) ... That way you can implement the traversal any way you like but at the same time the language constructs are kept simple. Hauke
Sep 23 2003
"Hauke Duden" <H.NS.Duden gmx.net> wrote in message news:bkp153$2fsv$1 digitaldaemon.com...My intuition is that this should be done using a wrapper iterator object. Something like this: foreach(TreeElement el ; new DepthFirstTreeIterator(someTree)) ... That way you can implement the traversal any way you like but at the same time the language constructs are kept simple.Yes. In fact, I have an example somewhere that shows how you can use this to iterate over an array in reverse!
Sep 23 2003
"Walter" <walter digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:bkr33g$2ajg$1 digitaldaemon.com..."Hauke Duden" <H.NS.Duden gmx.net> wrote in messagetoThat way you can implement the traversal any way you like but at the same time the language constructs are kept simple.Yes. In fact, I have an example somewhere that shows how you can use thisiterate over an array in reverse!You just need to know some other avenue of accessing the values than apply(). operator[] or something. But then you get into inefficiency again, going through the public interface, using indexing. And in the end we'll end up with a profusion of access functions, with each container specifying different, incompatible interfaces. Sean
Sep 24 2003
Sean L. Palmer wrote:You just need to know some other avenue of accessing the values than apply(). operator[] or something. But then you get into inefficiency again, going through the public interface, using indexing. And in the end we'll end up with a profusion of access functions, with each container specifying different, incompatible interfaces.Well, the obvious solution would be that the Tree itself provides the iterator object, so it can work directly on the internal data structures. But this gave me another idea: Walter, what do you think about allowing delegates to be passed to foreach? That way one could simply define different public iterator methods that could be specified directly. For example: class Tree { public: int depthSearch(int delegate(inout TreeElement) dg); int breadthSearch(int delegate(inout TreeElement) dg); }; Tree someTree=new Tree; foreach( TreeElement el; &someTree.depthSearch ) ... Sometimes this may be come in handy. Hauke
Sep 24 2003
"Sean L. Palmer" <palmer.sean verizon.net> wrote in message news:bkom9h$2018$1 digitaldaemon.com...Then again the apply() function might already be capable of this?Yes, it is!Interesting... You could certainly make a kind of iterator adapter class.Yes.
Sep 23 2003