in reply to Re: Think for yourself. in thread is the use of map in a void context deprecated ?
But I find it hard to believe there are seasoned Perl programmers that have no problem with map if the map is on the right hand side of an assignment, but are suddenly getting confused if they assignment disappears.
Im with the bad style chanters on this one, although a borderline case, I dont froth at the mouth over it, and think the optimisation patch is a worthwhile addition to perl.
I emphasised one point of your comment however. When i see a map in void context that isnt part of an obfu or some CB whip-it-together, my first thought is "Hmm, what happend to the target of the map?" And then I go looking to see what I dont understand. And then I get annoyed and change it to a for loop so that nobody else wastes time trying to figure out the misleading code.
Theres a great experiment for demonstrating this type of principle.
PURPLE
GREEN
BLACK
RED
BLUE
YELLOW
Now read off the color of each word in the list quickly. Make any mistakes? I bet you did.
And this is the core problem with map in void context. It makes people think that something is happening that isn't, and then when they realize it isn't, they wonder why its not. Its about wasted time. Don't code like that if you work with me, because if I waste any time wondering why that map is there and there isnt a damn good excuse for it then you and I are going to be having an unpleasant conversation. Now if you decide to rework what was formerly a map without changing it to a for, and leave me a note in a comment I wont be so bothered. I probably wont even change the code for you, accepting it under the Shit Happens rule.
# this should be changed to a for, dont worry about it
But if I waste time trying to figure out if the missing part of the map is the cause of some trouble then i'm really not going to be happy.
For me the core of this is that Larry made the language wonderfully expressive so we con convey the maximum information about what we are doing by the constructs we use to do it. Just as languages have nuances and subtleties so too does perl. And when you mean one thing, and then say it in a way that is usually reserved for saying other things then you are potentially and unnecessarily confusing your audience. The cues they are trained to look for are lying to them. Frankly programming is a complex enough job without wondering if the code is lying to me. (It might be fun in obfus and japhs, but it ends there.)
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demerphq
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi
Re: Think for yourself.
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 06, 2003 at 19:50 UTC
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I emphasised one point of your comment however. When i see a map in void context that isnt part of an obfu or some CB whip-it-together, my first thought is "Hmm, what happend to the target of the map?" And then I go looking to see what I dont understand. And then I get annoyed and change it to a for loop so that nobody else wastes time trying to figure out the misleading code.
And that is something I don't understand. What makes map so
special? Any function in Perl will return
something, be it a buildin or a user defined sub, and even
operators return values. Why is it that people get all confused if they see a map in void context, and start looking where the return value goes, but they don't have
problems with other functions?
What makes map so special?
Abigail (really, I'd like to know)
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What makes map so special?
Because its name and general usage strongly suggests that it should return something. Take a sub like get_value if you saw that in void context wouldn't you wonder what is going on? Wouldn't it annoy you to discover that in fact the routine has nothing to do with getting a value? Well likewise for me and map. If you want to do some action for each member of a list, then use foreach. If you want to transform each member of a list into something else and get the resulting list back, then use map. The cues in the name help you understand the intent of the author more quickly and with less effort. If someone plays silly bugger and uses map as for then they have just thrown away a useful cue to a future developer as to what was on their mind when they wrote the code.
Think about it for a minute. We do our best to not confuse ourselves and theose that come after us. We don't use $var1 and $var2 for our variable names so that the programmer that follows us (more often than not itll be ourselves a few days or weeks later :-) has a hope in hell of figuring out what it going on. We don't name our subroutines A, B, C etc, for similar reason. We dont use goto's as our primary flow control mechanism etc. All of these things are to provide as much of a cognitive model of what is happening as possible. The same goes for map.
I mean why make life hard? Perl has a hugely expansive vocabulary as far as programming goes. Why waste the expressiveness that it provides? Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you want to map a list then do so, if you want to iterate over the list then do so, but don't pretend to one when you are really doing the other.
---
demerphq
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi
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Because its name and general usage strongly suggests that it should return something.
But where is this notion coming from? "map" as an operation
that maps a function over all the elements of a list doesn't
come from Perl (I've been familiar with the operation and the
name even before Larry released Perl 1.000), and its name
doesn't suggest anything about return values shall be used.
Someone, or something, has seeded this notion that the first
argument of map should be side-effect free, and it wasn't
Larry - otherwise $_ wouldn't be an alias.
Take a sub like get_value if you saw that in void context wouldn't you wonder what is going on?
Sure, I'd figure that either the caller hadn't understand
the working of get_value, or that the name of the function
was misleading. But "map" isn't called "get_value". It's
just "map". Short for "mapping a function over a list".
And that's just what it's doing. It isn't called "construct
a list by collecting return values". In fact, if I want
to add one to all elements of an array, I find:
map {$_ += 1} @array;
to be far more natural than:
for (@array) {$_ += 1}
I find it more surprising that $_ is an alias for the
list element in a 'for' loop than in a 'map' operation.
Let's look at the first sentence of 'perldoc -f map':
Evaluates the BLOCK or EXPR for each element of
LIST (locally setting $_ to each element) and
returns the list value composed of the results of
each such evaluation.
Before it talks about return values, it describes what map
does: evaluating a piece of code for each element of the
list.
Anyway, you haven't convinced me. I refuse to deal with
"map" differently than other functions. And if I can use
other functions in void context, I can use "map" in void
context.
Abigail | [reply] [d/l] [select] |
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And that is something I don't understand. What makes map so
special? Any function in Perl will return
something, be it a buildin or a user defined sub, and even
operators return values. Why is it that people get all confused if they see a map in void context, and start looking where the return value goes, but they don't have
problems with other functions?
What makes map so special?
Map is special, in my opinion, because there is a nearly analogous construct
which does not return values.
Good style involves choosing appropriate tools. Given a situation where
no return value will be used, I tend to expect someone to pick the tool
which returns no value... unless there is a good reason to do otherwise.
Forcing list context, for example.
If I see someone make a different choice, I will wonder why, and I will
investigate. If, at the end of my investigation, I conclude that the author
could have used a foreach loop just as effectively, I will be annoyed. By
passing up the more appropriate (and more obvious) tool, he has obliged me
to go looking for something subtle which was not there. Likewise, I wouldn't
expect a person to choose
() = do_something ($_) for @some_list;
over
do_something ($_) for @some_list;
unless there was actually a need to force list context; if the author
consistenly chose the former as his idiom without good reason, I'd find
it very irritating (though not half so irritating as an author who
inconsistently chose this, or map in void context, without good
reason).
On the other hand, perhaps the author intends to alert me to the
significance of context here. Saying
() = do_something ($_) for @some_list;
would then be a louder
hint, and I'd generally prefer it; but if the author was consistent in
using map for this purpose, I wouldn't call it bad style. I might appreciate
a note somewhere, as this is not common practice.
An author might choose map for this, I think, on the grounds that he
was choosing the most appropriate tool. In a very
fastidious author, whose code was so clean and consistent that it gave
the reader a sense of confidence that each thing was as it was for a
reason, this might be a bit of minimalism which I would admire. However
I would be surprised to see such a person call his own functions
in such a fashion, because I wouldn't expect him to write a function which
altered its arguments differently depending on the context in which it was
called. I cannot think of a good reason to do this.
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Good style involves choosing appropriate tools. Given a situation where
no return value will be used, I tend to expect someone to pick the tool
which returns no value...
But map in void context does not return a value. No function
in void context returns a value - it can't, because there's nothing
to put the value in. That return values of functions are context
driven is a very essential thing that makes Perl what it is. It's not
map that decides whether nothing, a scalar or a list will be returned -
it's the context. And map doesn't behave any different than any other
function.
By passing up the more appropriate (and more obvious) tool, he has
obliged me to go looking for something subtle which was not there.
That sounds like "for is the more obvious tool, because it's more obvious".
Abigail
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Vaguely, because map has control structure characteristics rather than reading purely like a function. Unlike any of the "real" loops it does have a return value, however.
Not so coincidentally, I've sometimes thought it would be nice if for could build a list as well - in which case any distinction between the two would really go out the window for good. Ruby works this way.
Makeshifts last the longest.
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