[Newbies] Iterating and removing items from OrderedCollections

[Ian J Cottee]

A reply to everyone who replied. Many thanks indeed. I really appreciate it.

The first example below is perfect for me so far in the small number
of unit tests I've written. I'll do some more tomorrow.

Now I just have to understand what it's doing ;)

Ian

PS My solution was about ten lines of code and very obviously procedural!

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> 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
>>>>
>
>
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