Juerd: 2005/11/23, Juerd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Flavio S. Glock skribis 2005-11-23 10:13 (-0200): > > Can we have: > > say 1..Inf; > > It's important, I think, to note that this isn't item context, but list > context. Str list context, but still list context. Which means 1..Inf > isn't stringified as a whole. &say will have an array that represents > the lazy list. It should iterate over that rather than output it all at > once, anyway, for reasons of conserving memory.
Ah, ok - but I believe that say() is slurpy, which means the list must be instantiated first. > > to output an infinite stream, instead of just looping forever? > > How do you imagine anything outputs infinite stuff, without looping > forever? I don't think stdout knows about our kind of laziness :) There are some reasons for this - you can see what's happening, and press ctrl-C; or you may wish for it to output until there is a timeout; or maybe you are writing a daemon which is supposed to run forever anyway. > > OTOH, it would be nice if > > say substr( ~(1..Inf), 0, 10 ) > > printed "1 2 3 4 5". > > Here, 1..Inf is stringified as a whole, while with say, each of the > individual elements of the list are separately stringified. The question > of lazy strings is an interesting one. It would be very useful, and > would also allow GREAT things like > > my $revfoo := reverse $foo; > $revfoo ~~ s/foo/bar/g; > > I wonder if it's doable, though... I believe it is - I've come to this idea while trying to write down the Array spec, and it seems pretty feasible. > Juerd Thanks! - Flavio
