Issue 5756 - amap() and maybe afilter() too
Summary: amap() and maybe afilter() too
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: D
Classification: Unclassified
Component: phobos (show other issues)
Version: D2
Hardware: All All
: P4 enhancement
Assignee: No Owner
URL:
Keywords: bootcamp
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-03-19 17:09 UTC by bearophile_hugs
Modified: 2024-12-01 16:14 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description bearophile_hugs 2011-03-19 17:09:37 UTC
I suggest to add to Phobos functions like amap() and maybe afilter() too.

amap() means array(map())
afilter() means array(filter())


Rationale:

- Functions like sum() are used all the time, Python programmers use it thousands of times.
- In some situations a specialized version is faster, I have shown this about sum() in an enhancement request (Andrei has then tried to generalize this suggestion of mine again);
- array(map()) uses twice the number of parentheses of amap(). Haskell syntax shows very well why too many parentheses make functional-style code needlessly harder to read.
- Experience shows me that in D you can't use lazy things as much as you use in Haskell. This means that very often I have to convert the results of D map()/filter() to true arrays.
- sum() is a semantic chunk, while reduce!q{a+b}() is not as explicit in its purpose, it's not a single chunk. You are able to speed up your coding if you need to use less chunks.
- The number of "nearly duplicated" functions to add is quite limited.

But such functions aren't orthogonal, you can build them with few other small things. In Python std library you see functions that aren't orthogonal, but they are handy, like ifilterfalse() and starmap():
http://docs.python.org/library/itertools.html

You see something similar in the Haskell Prelude (it's a standard module loaded and compiled before any other), a very well designed piece of code:
http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/standard-prelude.html

It contains un-orthogonal functions like:

concatMap :: (a -> [b]) -> [a] -> [b]
concatMap f = concat . map f


zipWith          :: (a->b->c) -> [a]->[b]->[c]
zipWith z (a:as) (b:bs)
                 =  z a b : zipWith z as bs
zipWith _ _ _    =  []


zip              :: [a] -> [b] -> [(a,b)]
zip              =  zipWith (,)


putStrLn   :: String -> IO ()
putStrLn s =  do putStr s
                 putStr "\n"
  

print      :: Show a => a -> IO ()
print x    =  putStrLn (show x)
Comment 1 bearophile_hugs 2011-03-23 23:47:04 UTC
As in std.parallelism, I suggest to add a second optional argument to the amap()/afilter(), an optional buffer to return the result. If the buffer is provided, it must be the same length as the range.

So you write:

auto numbers = iota(10);
auto squareRoots = new double[numbers.length];
amap!sqrt(numbers, squareRoots);

Instead of:

auto numbers = iota(10);
auto squareRoots = new double[numbers.length];
copy(map!sqrt(numbers), squareRoots);
Comment 2 bearophile_hugs 2011-03-27 13:38:59 UTC
It seems dsimcha has renamed two functions in std.parallelism, now the eager version is named amap:

http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=132731
Comment 3 bearophile_hugs 2011-04-12 17:19:56 UTC
See also bug 5838
Comment 4 bearophile_hugs 2011-09-14 04:55:40 UTC
See here for better explanations:

http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=29516
Comment 5 bearophile_hugs 2011-09-29 15:06:38 UTC
An example of amap usage. This is input data:

auto data = ["1111100000",
             "1111000000",
             "1110000000",
             "1100001000",
             "1000010000",
             "0000100001",
             "0001000011",
             "0010000111",
             "0000001111",
             "0000011111"];

To convert it into a 2D matrix of booleans:

auto r = array(map!q{ array(map!q{ a == '1' }(a)) }(data));

The result r:
    
[[true, true, true, true, true, false, false, false, false, false], [true, true, true, ...]]

Using amap the line of code becomes shorter and less noisy, almost readable:

auto r = amap!q{ amap!q{ a == '1' }(a) }(data);
Comment 6 Infiltrator 2014-03-19 21:21:18 UTC
Would you like to create a PR for this?
Comment 7 dlangBugzillaToGithub 2024-12-01 16:14:01 UTC
THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN MOVED TO GITHUB

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/9900

DO NOT COMMENT HERE ANYMORE, NOBODY WILL SEE IT, THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN MOVED TO GITHUB