Re^6: reduce like iterators

In general and in theory, no.

But lots of people have so done, and it works out reasonably well in practice. For a random example Dominus used char(20) for this purpose in the widely used Memoize. (Then documented the limitation.) This code is significantly faster than a robust escape mechanism would have been, and he provided a mechanism to fix the potential bug if you needed to.

Comment on Re^6: reduce like iterators

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Re^7: reduce like iterators by LanX (Saint) on Jan 19, 2011 at 12:53 UTC
I know and agree that the probability of a bug is much smaller when using a magic string, and at the end "bug-freeness" of non-trivial code is only a product of probabilities. In other words IT isn't math! But I prefer solutions where I don't have to document (and keep in mind) rare side cases. Especially in this case, simulating reduce's approach to start with the first two values is clean and elegant. Cheers Rolf	[reply]

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Re^7: reduce like iterators
by LanX (Saint) on Jan 19, 2011 at 12:53 UTC

In other words IT isn't math!

But I prefer solutions where I don't have to document (and keep in mind) rare side cases.

Especially in this case, simulating reduce's approach to start with the first two values is clean and elegant.

Cheers Rolf

[reply]