[swift-evolution] Proposal: Add SequenceType.first

[Gwendal Roué]

> Le 3 janv. 2016 à 01:58, Kevin Ballard <kevin at sb.org> a écrit :
> 
>>> seq.generate().next() may not be nice, but no one can get fooled by it.
>> 
>> Well, for one thing, because it doesn't work. […]
> 
> Exactly. If `seq.generate().next()` worked, I'd be perfectly happy with that. […]

Right.

> Le 3 janv. 2016 à 06:50, Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com> a écrit :
> 
>> If I don’t sound sympathetic, it’s because nobody has shown a use-case for this functionality, and until I see one I am going to have a hard time believing there’s a problem worth solving.  If you want to make the case that we need something like this, please show me why. 
> 
> Didn't this thread start off with a use case?
> 
> 	seq.lazy.filter(predicate).first		// is not actually lazy, and Swift provides no good way to do this
> 
> One way to fix this is to add `first` to `SequenceType`, but it feels strange for a property to potentially consume part of the sequence. `buffered` ultimately has the same problem. By representing this as a function, it at least looks like something that might have side effects.

Out of honesty, here is another use case: `database.fetch(…).first`.

Since this is not possible today, database APIs have to expose another `fetchFirst()` (fetchOne, pluck, whatever) method, that uses a temporary generator on the sequence returned by the fetch() method.

If sequence.first would exist, the database API would not have to define this extra method.

Gwendal