John Macdonald wrote:
On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 03:02:41PM -0500, Rod Adams wrote:
If there are good uses for coroutines that given/take does not address, I'll gladly change my opinion. But I'd like to see some examples.
FWIW, I believe that Patrick's example of the PGE returning matches could be written with given/take (if it was being written in P6).
Um, I don't recall what given/take provides, so I may be only
addressing the limitations of lazy lists...
First off, it's gather/take, not given/take. My mistake. Oops.
Here goes my understanding of gather/take:
"gather" takes a block as an argument, and returns a lazy list object. Inside that block, one can issue "take" commands, which "push" one or more values onto the list. However, since it's all lazy, it only executes the block when someone needs something off the list that currently isn't there. And even then, it only executes the block up until enough "take"s have happened to get the requested value. If the block exits, the list is ended.
A simple example:
sub grep ($test, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) {
gather {
for @values -> $x {
take $x if $x ~~ $test;
}
}
}Since the block in question is in effect a closure, and gets called whenever a new value to the lazy list is requested, I believe it provides all of the generator aspects of coroutines. It could access various up-scoped/global variables, thereby changing it's behavior midcourse, if needed. You can create several versions of the same generator, all distinct, and with separate "states", and easily keep them separate. To create a new list, you call the function. To resume a list, you ask for a value from the list it hasn't already created.
Once you have some of these lazy list functions made, pipelining them together is trivial via "==>" or "<==".
I'll ask again for a couple examples of the non-generator uses, mostly out of curiosity, but also to better evaluate the proposals being kicked around in this thread.For many simple uses generators are exactly what you need, but they have limits. A more powerful coroutine mechanism can easily provide the simple forms (and, I would expect, without any serious loss of performance).
-- Rod Adams
