[swift-evolution] [Review] Add a Lazy flatMap for Sequences of Optionals

[Kevin Ballard]

I've stated in the past that I'd like to see Optional conform to
SequenceType. It may as well conform to CollectionType too. The only
real drawback I'm aware of is the addition of extra methods/properties
on Optional, which shouldn't actually be a problem, it just seems a
little noisy.

Incidentally, pre-1.0 Rust used to actually have a fair amount of code
that used a for-loop to iterate an Option. The Option type still is
iterable, but the introduction of `if let` into Rust served to replace
the existing uses of the for loop.

In any case, I'm broadly in favor of supporting lazy.flatMap. I'm
concerned about the specific implementation in the proposal because
LazyMapSequence<LazyFilterSequence<LazyMapSequence<Elements, T?>>, T> is
kind of a ridiculous type to be getting back from a single call to
flatMap(). I'm most in favor of making Optional conform to
CollectionType and using that to simply flatMap; barring that, the
CollectionOfZeroOrOne idea looks promising.

-Kevin Ballard

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015, at 12:03 AM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution wrote:
>
>> On Dec 15, 2015, at 7:21 PM, Rob Mayoff via swift-evolution <swift-
>> evolution at swift.org> wrote: Dmitri wrote:
>>>
>>> What's the advantage?  Why would we want to have a type that is
>>> isomorphic to Optional, except that conforms to CollectionType?
>>>
>>
>> My question (apologies if it has been answered already) is: Why isn't
>> Optional a CollectionType, like it is in Scala?
> I don't remember the rationale, but it used to be that way[1] and
> during the run-up to the Swift 1 release IIRC several members of the
> Swift team objected to it.  That's the answer to Dmitri's question: I
> have considered that to be off the table, but we could revisit it.
>
> One cute effect, which might be too cute for some, is that
>
> if let x = y {  ... }
>
> becomes equivalent to
>
> for x in y { ... }
>
> when y is an optional.
>
> -Dave
>
>
> _________________________________________________
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Links:

  1. https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/fad874708e05cff56aec5587a4b0f49cdadc6d11
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