[Newbies] Iterating and removing items from OrderedCollections

[Bert Freudenberg]

Ah, that's a much better description. So you actually don't want to  
remove nils from the start, but simply remove enough until the size is  
small enough? Now that's simple:

belt size - desiredSize timesRepeat: [belt remove: nil ifAbsent: []].

And to answer Marcin's next question, yes, that would be O(m^2). It  
doesn't matter for Ian's purpose I think, but an O(n) version would be

toRemove := belt size - desiredSize.
belt removeAllSuchThat: [:each | each == nil and: [(toRemove :=  
toRemove-1) >= 0]].

... which is obviously less elegant ;)

- Bert -

Am 18.09.2008 um 10:49 schrieb Ian J Cottee:

> Hi
>
> It's emulating a conveyor belt. The 10 elements are slots on the belt
> that a machine at one end can place items into. Every x seconds the
> belt moves on one step. If the first machine hasn't put an item in the
> slot, the slot is empty. At the other end, if the there's an item in
> the slot when it gets to the front of the queue - that's given to the
> next machine. So depending on what the loading machine is doing, you
> can end up with gaps on the belt.
>
> However, as it's a simulation the user may wish to change the size of
> the belt - in which case I have to remove slots with nothing in them
> (I can't remove slots which do have items on them for obvious
> reasons).
>>
>> On 9/18/08, Ian J Cottee <icottee at bluefountain.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello all
>>>
>>> I've got an OrderedCollection that is normally a fixed size (let's  
>>> say
>>> 10 elements). Each element in the collection is another an object or
>>> nil. So for example, at a point in time it might look like
>>>
>>> [nil, nil, Object, nil, Object, Object, nil, nil, Object, nil]
>>>
>>> What I want is to be able to resize the collection. Making it bigger
>>> is no problem for me, I can just add nils to the end of the
>>> collection. Making it smaller is involving a little bit of pain. I  
>>> can
>>> see ways of doing it but theyr'e not elegant and I'm sure there are
>>> cleaner ways of doing it. If I made the above queue smaller I'd
>>> basically remove the nils starting from the beginning. So a resize  
>>> to
>>> size 7 would give me
>>>
>>> [ Object, Object, Object, nil, nil, Object, nil]
>>>
>>> i.e. the first three nils have been removed.
>>>
>>> Does anybody have any comments on appropriate code to handle this?  
>>> If
>>> not, I'll go with the ugly stuff but it would be nice to know the
>>> correct SmallTalk way.
>>>
>>> Many thanks for any suggestions.
>>>
>>> Ian
>>>