Another Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

http://prog21.dadgum.com/141.html

by AndreiVajnaII • 14 years ago

26 33 14 years ago

prog21.dadgum.com

pdw• 14 years ago

Perl can do this as well:

    @a = (10, 5, 9, 6, 20, 17, 1);
    @slice = @a[0, 1, 3, 6];

Though I've never seen this used for anything other than simple sublists (like @a[0..3]).

disgruntledphd2• 14 years ago

I use this kind of stuff in R all the time. Its actually wonderful how many typical data analytic tasks can be expressed in this format. Thats why, I suspect, both R and J have this operator.

tzs• 14 years ago

I've used something like that:

   @state[1,2,3,5,6,7,9,10,11,13,14,15] =
     @state[5,10,15,9,14,3,13,2,7,1,6,11];

That's the row shift transformation in AES encryption.

no_flags• 14 years ago

So can MATLAB.

   a = [10 5 9 6 20 7];
   slice = a([1 2 4 7]);

I guess it's not called matrix laboratory for nothing.

roguecoder• 14 years ago

plus, MATLAB has "find", which returns a list of all the positions of a matrix matching some pattern. The combination of the two makes things that are very ugly to express in other languages quite pretty.

Too bad it's wicked expensive, proprietary and slow. I quite enjoy the paradigm.

EvilTerran• 14 years ago

I've used perl's array slices as

  @array[@indices]

in the past. Can't remember why, but I have. It also works for hashes:

  %hash = (foo => "bar", one => "two", alpha => "beta");
  @keys = ('alpha', 'one');
  @hash{@keys} == ('beta', 'two');

sparky_z• 14 years ago

An array slice can also be used as an lvalue in an assignment:

  @a = (10, 5, 9, 6, 17, 1);
  @a[3,5,1] = qw(yes no maybe);
  print "@a";

  >> "10 maybe 9 yes 17 no"

In fact, because the slice can be both an lvalue and an rvalue, this is an easy way to transpose elements in-place.

  @a = (10, 5, 9, 6, 17, 1);
  @a[0,4] = @a[4,0];
  print "@a";

  >> "17, 5, 9, 6, 10, 1";

peteretep2• 14 years ago

Oh look, you just invented array slices!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_slicing

freudianquip• 14 years ago

"The concept of slicing was surely known even before the invention of compilers. Slicing as a language feature probably started with FORTRAN (1957)"

Maybe slightly late for that.

batista2• 14 years ago

Guy who doesn't understand general statements and statistics: "Your title is wrong, _I have_ heard of that idiom".

A different guy with the same deficiency: "Wrong, it's a common idiom in (list of obscure languages)".

Plus: array slicing, in 95% of the languages mentioned (and 99% of common languages) is NOT what he talks about. It just returns a sub-array and it only takes an uper/lower bound.

peteretep2• 14 years ago

Do you really think of Perl as an obscure language?

kd0amg• 14 years ago

Yeah, ok, array slicing, woohoo. But what's interesting here is that this doesn't come from any special/privileged syntax or from special handling by the { operator. The { operator just expects a scalar and a list and accesses an element of the list according to the scalar. This slicing capability simply falls out of the automatic lifting J does when you pass an array of higher rank than the operator expects, the same rule that gives you (2 5 3)+7 = (9 12 10).

silentbicycle5• 14 years ago

J has it via APL, which is heavily based on linear algebra. (Not surprisingly, R, MATLAB, and other matrix-math-centric languages also have it.)

It's one thing to say, "yeah, I can kinda do this in [language]", it's quite another when your whole language is based on it, as the APL family are. If you can do array slicing in parallel, you can work with permutation vectors rather than sorts (as he notes), and guess what? The same idiom works for relational joins, among many other things. (The killer app for Q, kdb+, is an in-memory, column oriented relational database. NoSQL, before it was cool.)

northbranch• 14 years ago

This pattern is incredibly useful in Q, and one of the things I miss about using it daily. Of course, now I mainly use java, so the pendulum has truly swung.

jhuni• 14 years ago

I have heard of both this programming idioms: this and the original. In fact, both of these two programming idioms can be expressed in terms of in degree regular algebraic relations (e.g Common Lisp place forms). Indexes are places because you can retrieve the value at an index (nth coll i) and you can edit the value at the index (setf (nth coll i) val).

Slices of collections are themselves places, and they can be decomposed further into even finer places. In Common Lisp the subseq function describes such places: (setf (subseq coll start end) slice). Injective functions have an in degree regularity of one, which means that they are trivial place forms. As such, the original programming idiom can be described as a process that moves an object to a place, runs some functions, and then moves back to the starting place.

onlyup• 14 years ago

This seems cool but I have a question. Is this:

> 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 { 10 5 9 6 20 17 1

Stored in an array? Because if it is, when I do this:

> 2 3 4 5 6 { 10 5 9 6 20 17 1

Won't I have to rearrange the whole array? (deleting two of the index parts)

silentbicycle5• 14 years ago

It doesn't rearrange the array, it constructs a new one. While I'm not 100% sure about the J implementation* , K and related languages usually modify the array in place if there's only a single reference to it (so that mutation is still referentially transparent), to avoid extra allocation & copying.

* It's now open-source at https://github.com/openj/core, but I have a hard time following their C style -- it's legal C, but written like J.

APLs have memory allocators that are designed with arrays in mind, making this less expensive than you might expect. See this post I wrote about the memory management for Kona (https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona/), an open-source implementation of K: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/kona-dev/fs5GoSBtF3Y... .

darklajid2• 14 years ago

I don't quite understand the question. Are you asking if the latter example needs to modify the whole array, because you 'cut off' the first two elements?

I don't know J at all, but I'd assume that the result of the '{' is a _new_ array. All I've seen about J is very much rooted in mathematics and therefor I'd expect a functional/immutable language. Nothing would be 'deleted', no array changed/rearranged and a new array without the first two elements created/returned.

Note the fat 'no idea about J' disclaimer, of course.

simonb2• 14 years ago

Clojure can do this as well without requiring any special syntax or function because all sequence are funcallable:

  (map [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10] [0 3 4])
  => (1 4 5)

silentbicycle5• 14 years ago

Does it do the slicing in parallel?

darklajid2• 14 years ago

If not (I assume no), would you accept

(pmap [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10] [0 3 4])

instead? pmap being defined as "Like map, except f is applied in parallel" [1]

That said, I'm too ignorant to understand the deeper benefits of the parallel approach. It seems it enables nifty things according to some other comments in this thread, yet I've been unable to understand quite why so far.

1: http://clojure.github.com/clojure/clojure.core-api.html#cloj...

simonb2• 14 years ago

No, but it does it lazily.

pmap mentioned above probably has too much overhead for what you are thinking as it is intended for more coarse distribution of workload.

sbmassey• 14 years ago

He should rename it "Another Programming Idiom I Had Never Heard Of".

eevilspock• 14 years ago

How can it be an idiom if we haven't heard of it?

repsilat• 14 years ago

There are plenty of idioms in Hebrew that I've never heard of.

This is an idiom in a subculture you aren't a part of, in languages you do not speak. There are a lot of them. The author assumed that because J is not really a "mainstream language" that the people reading his blog would probably not be familiar with its idioms.

bingbing• 14 years ago

That idiom is called an array slice in perl.

  # perl -e "print join ' ', (10,5,9,6,20,17,1)[0,1,3,6]"
  10 5 6 1

http://perldoc.perl.org/perldata.html#Slices

darkstalker• 14 years ago

Didn't know about the 3[array] syntax in C. I know that a[b] evaluates to *(a+b) but never tought that the inverted form would work.

Luyt• 14 years ago

Python version

  [(10,5,9,6,20,17,1)[i] for i in (6,1,3,2,0,5,4)]

bgilroy26• 14 years ago

If this piques anyone's interest in the J language, Dadgum writes elsewhere about a neat book to learn graphics programming in J.

http://prog21.dadgum.com/19.html

Another Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

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