Fellow Squeaker with project you might find interesting

Brian Rice water at tunes.org
Sat Jun 16 20:51:03 UTC 2001


Hi Roel and Squeakers,
I've played around with QSOUL a little and considered your ideas. I 
am heavily involved in my own somewhat similar but less orthodox (not 
that yours is orthodox in most senses ;) project, and I thought I'd 
share what I'd developed.

The source code is at http://www.tunes.org/~water/arrow and most of 
it is not relevant to your average Smalltalker. However, I managed to 
create a really neat little utility that others interesting in 
functional/logic ideas would find possibly useful to look at. (Please 
ignore the project file which contains out-of-date code.)

I have these lazy (immutable but often infinite) collections with 
caches which can be made either Weak or regular Sets for the various 
purposes these collections play. Because they contain arrows (this is 
the part most irrelevant to Smalltalkers), I call them graphs, but 
otherwise your average Smalltalker should not find them too difficult.

Anyway, part of the protocol is that I can take lazy collections of 
objects and filter them with a block as a one-item predicate query. 
ArrowGraph class>>top returns basically the top collection type 
instance that contains everything when queried. The filter operator 
is >> and can be sequentially-applied quite safely.

So basically I can enter:

f _ ArrowWorld objects.	"Due to the current arrow architecture."
g _ f >> [:value | value isKindOf: Number].
g includes: (Arrow wrapping: 3/4 in: f).	"A membership test."

and g will contain all the numbers. g can accept further filters 
itself. You can force addition of elements to the cache of a filter 
using +. Filtered lazy collections can also be lazily combined with 
set operations | and &. The existential quantification feature 
requires a pattern-matcher which is integral to Arrow so it's not 
likely your average Smalltalker would want to put up with the whole 
Arrow environment overhead to get the benefit (at least until I 
mature the architecture and manage to fork a Smalltalk utility 
sub-package for the matcher).

Anyway, what do you think?
~





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