Jose and Stefan have expressed technical reasons why a particular
order of execution cannot/should not be guaranteed by foreach. I understand their point of view, but IMHO there is a more serious
underlying philosophical reason why this would not be a good thing.
When you say "people are used to it executing in a defined order" To me this says there is some kind of implied dependency between the tasks. This would represent a loss of information, because you then would have dependencies that are not captured explicitly in Ant.
I have created a fairly extensive set of Ant buildfiles, and have several places where I perform tasks on a set of items. While some kind of looping or foreach task would make my buildfiles more concise, it would not otherwise change the functionality. No particular ordering is required.
Can you give an example where you would need an ordered collection, rather than a set?
--Craeg
Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote:
Ant is not a Scripting/Programming tool. It expresses in a declarative fashion the way to build something. You do not specify the total order of all targets. It is upto ANT's dependecy engine to decide the order of execution as long as dependencies are preserved. There is no reason why FOREACH should work any different. If the iterations are computed based on <fileset> or some other, then we need to be aware that such constructs are SETS and such there is no order associated with its elements. And there is little way to guarantee that it will be iterated in the sameorder on every OS that may ever exists.
Jose Alberto
From: "Matthew Inger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I think that not guaranteeing the order of a foreach task is a very bad thing. It's a scripting/programming style task, and people are used to it executing in a defined order, and to change that at some later date would produced behavior that some might not expect.
