[racket] Interesting article

I think you are mostly right. There is not an obvious operation like
the list operations for many collections. Nevertheless, we should have
good defaults for making a user's life convenience.

Jay

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Deren Dohoda <deren.dohoda at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am a novice, self-taught programmer. Please forgive this possibly
> naive question, but what's the problem? The big post I read seems to
> say this one sentence: different containers are different, but they
> should act the same.
>
> But, different containers are different for a good reason.
>
> Take a linked list. "map" is a well-known operation, taking a
> procedure and a list, and returning a (possibly fresh) list with proc
> applied to every element of the original list. Now, take a vector.
> What does map mean? I can't answer this question.
>
> 1) Well, you chose a vector because it is mutable, so map should
> really be something like map! and return void
> 2) Well, you chose a vector because it is random-access, so this one
> exceptional O(n) operation should return a vector for otherwise
> random-access use
> 3) Well, you only do something to every element as processing for more
> doing-something-to-every-element so it should return a list with
> better filter behavior
> 4) Well, *I* have no clue what you want, so I'll just create this view
> called a "sequence" and give you that (oh yeah it just acts like a
> list)
> 5) Well, *I* have no clue what you want, so I'll just leave it up to
> you to make your own map-like function
>
> I can't pick between 1 through 3, because I don't know why someone is
> doing something to every element of a vector (curiosity: why didn't
> they use a list in the first place?). I don't believe (4) is so much a
> "solution" as a way to relocate the problem to post-processing of your
> containter-viewed-through-a-sequence rather than pre-processing by
> selecting the right function in the first place. (Of course, (5) is
> not a solution, either, but a refusal to do anything at all.)
>
> Can someone please elaborate a bit on why this map-vs-vector-map is a
> problem? I feel like I am missing something kind of basic here.
>
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Eduardo Bellani <ebellani at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> http://programming-puzzler.blogspot.com/2010/08/racket-vs-clojure.html
>>
>> Any opinions on the subject?
>>
>> - --
>> Eduardo Bellani
>>
>> omnia mutantur, nihil interit.
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://teammccarthy.org/jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93