I use a screwdriver to open a paint can. They make special tools just for opening paint cans, but I find that excessive--why buy and not lose another small tool, and keep it around and gather it up as part of a painting project? The screwdrivers are among the most common and versatile tools in my typical work, and I have then ready at hand.

So, why do we even have foreach and map as separate constructs when they do the same thing? Perhaps only for historical reasons. It makes sense to have a looping construct that applies a block to each item in a list. Now if the construct itself were to return a value, what would that value be? A list of all the "results" of the block makes perfect sence. So if you could use foreach as an expression rather than a statement, it would naturally be map.

And we all know that grep is a trivial usage of map. We don't really need it as a core part of the language, any more than we need chop.

—John

In reply to Re: Re: Insensitive Scoundrel by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Insensitive Scoundrel by bluto

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