What makes a good lazy procedure? And how to do it?

Using Swift
2

Hi Daryle,

I think this is a perfect case for an addition to the existing Lazy suite (and IMO would make a good evolution proposal too, as this kind of “chunked” splitting is a useful feature). You’re right though, there isn’t a good guide out there for how to do this (calling any intrepid blogger who wants to write one…)

Here’s a sketch of how it would fit into lazy. This is with the latest toolchain from master, which makes things a LOT easier now that IndexDistance is dead. It’s slightly inefficient because it re-uses Index from Base for its index, it would be more efficient to use a start/end pair for the chunks but that’s a lot more code :)

What’s also interesting is you could (with conditional conformance now that’s landed) make it a RandomAccessCollection if the base were random access, but not if the base is bidirectional, because you need to be able to calculate the size of the last element in constant time.

struct LazyChunkedCollection<Base: Collection> {
    let base: Base
    let size: Int
}

extension LazyChunkedCollection: Collection {
    typealias Index = Base.Index
    typealias Element = Base.SubSequence
    
    var startIndex: Index { return base.startIndex }
    var endIndex: Index { return base.endIndex }
    
    subscript(i: Index) -> Element {
        return base[i..<index(after: i)]
    }
    
    func index(after i: Index) -> Index {
        return base.index(i, offsetBy: size, limitedBy: base.endIndex) ?? base.endIndex
    }
}

// Keep the laziness transitive
extension LazyChunkedCollection: LazyCollectionProtocol { }

// Extending this protocol will make this feature appear on the .lazy property of Collection
extension LazyCollectionProtocol {
    // Elements/elements are a way to avoid redundent wrapping
    func chunked(into chunksOf: Int) -> LazyChunkedCollection<Elements> {
        return LazyChunkedCollection(base: elements, size: chunksOf)
    }
}

let l = Array(0..<10).lazy.chunked(into: 3)
for x in l {
    for y in x {
        print(y, terminator: ",")
    }
    print()
}
0,1,2,
3,4,5,
6,7,8,
9,

···

On Dec 29, 2017, at 18:40, Daryle Walker via swift-users <swift-users@swift.org> wrote:

I’ve been playing around with iterators/sequences/collections that partition to a set stride. For instance, given a collection with 16 elements and a stride argument of 3; I can generate a collection with 6 elements, the first 5 are sub-collections of count 3 and the last a sub-collection of count 1.

Now I’m wondering if I put these in a library on GitHub, should they be structured under the standard library’s “lazy” group of procedures? Or just separate types?

Oh, is there a modern guide for making lazy algorithm types? All the ones I’ve seen so far are from the Swift 1.0 days (when the algorithms were free functions instead of extensions of Sequence/Collection). Yes, I know I’m using busted vs. modern for a language only a few years old.

—
Daryle Walker
Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie
darylew AT mac DOT com

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