Re: Ultimate Language feature list

[adam@irvine.com]

Well, as long as we're talking about what language features we want,
here's one I've always wanted: The ability to deal with sequences of
objects.  I don't mean a list of objects where you have to create an
array or linked list in memory that contains all the objects; I mean
the ability to write code that talks about sequences of objects even
though the program only generates one at a time.  So I'd like to be
able to write a function like this:

        -- Integer_List is a "traditional" linked list of integers
    function Nonzero_Elements_Of (List : Integer_List)
                 return sequence of Integer is
    begin
        List_P := List;
        while List_P /= null loop
            if List_P.Data /= 0 then
                return List_P.Data;
                    -- Note: this RETURN would return one integer but
                    -- would NOT terminate the function; eventually the
                    -- caller would return to this point in the function
                    -- to get more
            end if;
            List_P := List_P.Next;
        end loop;
    end;

and the caller would have primitives available to test for the end of
the sequence, get the next element of the sequence, etc.; or you'd
have constructs like:

    for Int in Nonzero_Elements_Of (My_List) loop
        ...
    end loop;

which would set Int in turn to each element returned by the function;
or you'd have ways to deal with the whole sequence, e.g. you could
pass the function result of Nonzero_Elements_Of as an "in" parameter
to another procedure that declares a "sequence of Integer" as a
parameter.  Etc.  Of course, there would be no requirement that a
sequence be finite.

Well, I can dream.  Naturally, this dream has come up again since I'm
involved in another discussion involving how to implement an iterator.

                                -- Adam

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