The last two weeks I’ve been working on adding external iterators to Ioke. This work is now done and merged, so I thought I’d just describe it a bit.

But first, why do I need explicit iterators in Ioke? Ruby has gotten by without them for a long time, only implementing a Generator library using continuations, in the standard library. It’s pretty nice, since you don’t really need to do anything explicit to get external iterators from internal ones. Of course, the problem is that it’s very inefficient to implement them like this. So I decided that Ioke should have an explicit protocol for external iterators. You can implement internal iterators using external ones efficiently, but not the other way around.

The two major objects for this in Ioke is called Sequence and Mixins Sequenced. Sequenced is the mixin that gives you access to several helper methods if you implement the “seq” method. If you implement “seq” and mixin Sequenced you will also get an “each” method and Enumerable. The “seq” method is expected to return something that mimics Sequence and has one “next” method, and one “next?” method. That’s all. The “next?” method returns true if there is another element in the sequence, and “next” returns the next one. The protocol is undefined if you call “next” when “next?” would have returned false.

Sequenced give you an “each” method that in addition to the regular each-protocol will also return the result of calling “seq” if you don’t give any arguments to “each”.

Except for that, you will get several methods that just call “seq” and calls the same method on the result of that. These methods are: “mapped”, “collected”, “filtered”, “selected”, “grepped”, “zipped”, “dropped”, “droppedWhile” and “rejected”. These methods are also the same as exist on Sequence. These methods return new sequences that implement the same behavior as the methods with similar names on Enumerable.

Finally, Sequence also mimics Mixin Enumerable. Once you call one of the Enumerable-methods, the whole sequence will be realized, or as much as is necessary to give an answer. A small example of how you could use it:

(1..100000000) mapped(x, x*x) filtered(x, x % 3 == 0) takeWhile( < 10000 )

This example creates a range from 1 to 100,000,000 and finds all the squares that are less than 10,000 an d that is evenly dividable by 3.

By Ola Bini | In: ioke | tags: ioke, iterator, sequence. | #