[ruby-talk:7317] Re: Why isn't Perl highly orthogonal?

David Alan Black <[e-mail]> wrote:
>On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Ben Tilly wrote:
>
> > David Alan Black <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > >[1,2,3,4,5].map do |e| [e,-e] end .flatten
> > > > >   => [1, -1, 2, -2, 3, -3, 4, -4, 5, -5]
> > > > >
> > > > I thought of that.  But if you want your output to be an
> > > > array of arrays, it doesn't work right.
> > >
> > >Just don't .flatten it:
> > >
> > >[1,2,3,4,5].map do |e| [e,-e] end
> > >   => [[1, -1], [2, -2], [3, -3], [4, -4], [5, -5]]
> > >
> > >(I thought the flattened version was more what you'd meant,
> > >but anyway, either is possible.)
> >
> > Um, what if you want to do your array with indices map
> > on an array like the above?  .flatten is recursive, which
> > means that a list of list of list of lists turns into a
> > single list!
>
>I'm not sure what it is you're saying wouldn't work.  For example:
>
>a = [1,2,3,4,5]
>b = a.map do |e| [e,-e] end
>c = b.map_with_indices do |e,i| "element #{i} is #{e.inspect}" end
>
>p c[2]  # => "element 2 is [3, -3]"

I was thinking of the following:

  a = [1, [], [3,4,[]]]

Pass that to flatten and you will get [1,3,4]. which is
likely not what someone with that data structure intended
to do!

>The .flatten was only to illustrate (one version of) map (with a
>little help :-) producing an array with more elements than the input
>array.  (Are we talking past each other on some aspect of this?)

I think so.  I know how to get an array to wind up with more
elements than it started with.  But the flatten method is
unlikely to do what you wanted.

Incidentally I did discover an amusing gotcha in Ruby that
comes from the implicit recursion in a lot of functions.

  a = []
  a.push a
  a <=> a

Having thought about it, I think this is an appropriate
response.

[...]
>Yes and no.  I probably should have written "In fact" rather than
>"Then again", above.  My first line of thought was: since the method
>syntax turns a,b into [a,b] anyway, it's no big deal that we have to
>write [a,b] in the iterator block.  But I do wonder now why the same
>a,b syntax isn't allowed in such a block (where it would return [a,b])
>  -- no implications of non-Ruby-esque list behavior).

I don't have enough of a sense yet to even try to say what
Ruby-esque behaviour should be.  Sorry.

Cheers,
Ben
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