"Larry Wall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > [H]ow about a table that looks like this: > > next D next N all D all N > ====== ====== ===== ===== > $iter $iter.pull ?1 $iter.pull ?2 > @array @array.pull @array.values @array.pull @array > $array $array.pull $array.values $array.pull @$array > %hash %hash.pull %hash.values @array.pull %hash.values > $hash $hash.pull $hash.values @array.pull $hash.values > > After all, a pull is the other end of a push. > > Larry
True in real life, but why not pop as the destructive evil twin of push? I think 'pop' more clearly indicates a removing iteration than 'pull'. And its 25% shorter! But mainly because it's an established term for the exact concept we're going for here. A different concern I have, though, is this distinction we're assuming in an iterator between destructive (DS) and non-destructive (ND). It seems to me that, generally speaking, that should be an implementation detail of the iterated-upon object. For example, I might be reading lines from an arbitrary input stream. If the stream is stdin, this is clearly a "destructive" operation, in the sense of being non-reversible. However, the stream could just as easily be backed by a file on disk, where reading lines does not destroy or remove them. I shouldn't have to think about which method to use since I don't care about the effect. Huffman-wise, I imagine that's actually the most likely iteration scenario. I think the general iteration API should therefore be a via a name that does not care whether its underlying object is being consumed or not (the Callous Iterator). The syntactic <> should behave exactly this way. Then, for those occasions you do care about how the sequence is being processed, you can call either $seq.pop or $seq.next (or whatever names) for the specific DS/ND behavior you need. -Dov Wasserman
