Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> writes:
> I have a colleague who is allergic to mutating data structures. Yeah, I
> know, he needs to just HTFU but I thought I'd humour him.
>
> Suppose I have an iterator that yields named tuples:
>
> Parrot(colour='blue', species='Norwegian', status='tired and shagged out')
>
> and I want to collect them by colour:
>
> accumulator = {'blue': [], 'green': [], 'red': []}
> for parrot in parrots:
> accumulator[parrot.colour].append(parrot)
>
>
> That's pretty compact and understandable, but it require mutating a bunch
> of pre-allocated lists inside an accumulator. Can we re-write this in a
> functional style?
Here is a sketch in OCaml-style (incomplete of course):
type color = Blue | Green | Red;;
type parrot = { c: color; ... };;
let rec collect list_of_parrots =
match list_of_parrots with
| nil -> (nil,nil,nil)
| h :: q ->
let b,g,r = collect q in
match h with
| {c=Blue} -> (h::b,g,r)
| {c=Green} -> (b,h::g,r)
| {c=Red} -> (b,g,h::r)
;;
The function returns a triple of lists in this case. The first match
drives list-traversal, the second selects between colors. Both can be
(sub-optimally) turned into cascades of "if", i.e., in Python:
def collect(list_of_parrots):
if not list_of_parrots:
return [],[],[]
else
b,g,r = collect(list_of_parrots[1:])
h = list_of_parrots[0]
if h.color == 'blue':
return ([h]+b,g,r)
elif h.color == 'green':
... and so on
-- Alain.
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