OpenEuphoria

Argument for "foreach"

• Posted by D. Newhall <derek_newhall at yahoo.com> Feb 09, 2006
• 453 views

I know I have mentioned this before but I trully believe that a foreach
statement would benefit Euphoria greatly and I have proof this time! 

Many, many times we Euphorians have to type:

object element
for i=1 to length(list) do
    element = list[i]
    -- Code goes here
end for

to loop through every element of a list or string to perform checking on it. In
doing this we need to declare an extra variable (element) for the data we wish to
check, in the loop create the looping variable, and assign the new indexed value
to the other variable (yes, we can do list[i] but it's inefficient and looks
horrid in nested loops ex. element[i][j][k]). Instead of this a foreach statement
would greatly simplify things. We could instead write:

foreach element in list do
    -- Code goes here
end for

That's 33 keystrokes (+2 for shifts on '(' and ')') less than before and the
scope is more explicit (element is only available for use in the loop). This may
not seem like a lot but if you write this code frequently it could make a big
difference.

For this element should be read-only just like variables used with for and
element should be an object. Ideally, the interpreter would optimize this to
simply iterate through every element of the sequence but it could be added
quickly as a syntactic substitute for what we do already. One issue would be how
to treat atoms when used as list; should it error or set element to that one
value?


I went through some of my programs and checked to see exactly how many of my for
loops would be replaced with foreach if it was added. Here's the results from the
programs I last worked on (taken from my ConTEXT history):

lispkit.ex - Simple LISP interpreter

FOREACH
3
FOR
1

rmcomments.ex - Removes comments from file

FOREACH
2
FOR
1

diceroller.ex - A dice program for my friend's RPG group

FOREACH
0
FOR
1

EuDoc.ex - The "driver" for EuDoc

FOREACH
3
FOR
0

EuDoc.e - The main data-mangling routines for EuDoc

FOREACH
9
FOR
1

(Note: EuDoc.e might be off. I think I accidently counted 1 or 2 loops that
modify "element" which foreach would not allow)
(Note: Two of the "for"s are technically inaccurate since they looped backwards
and foreach element in reverse(list) would have taken care of it in hindsight)

As you can see for big files like EuDoc.e that's 297 characters less that I
wouldn't have to type. I should also note that In the grand scheme of things it
might not seem like that much but one could make the same argument with list[$]
versus list[length(list)] (which was an excellent idea BTW).

Of course there are good reasons not to implement foreach such as it makes the
language more complex, people will forget that element is read-only, it's not
worth the extra statement, it's not really that much work now, etc.


The previous discussion on "foreach" is here:

http://www.listfilter.com/cgi-bin/esearch.exu?thread=1&fromMonth=6&fromYear=A&toMonth=8&toYear=A&keywords=%222.6+feature+request:+foreach%22


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