[Ocaml-lib-devel] More thoughts on Enum

[Brian H. <bri...@ql...>]

Count is called, generally, for two reasons:

1) To pre-reserve space for all the elements in the enumeration.  This is 
how dynArray uses it.

2) To see if there are any more elements left in the enumeration (count > 
0).

The second case is the interesting one- it can always be O(1).  And it's 
the information we most often need.  So why not provide it directly?

Iter and map then start looking like:

let iter f t =
    let rec loop () =
        if t.has_next() then 
            f (t.next()); 
            loop () 
        else 
            ()
    in
    loop ()

let fold f init t =
    let rec loop accu =
        if t.has_next() then 
            loop (f (t.next()) accu) 
        else 
            accu
    in
       loop init

In extString, we'd have:

let enum l =
        let lr = ref l in
        Enum.make
                ~next:(fun () ->
                        match !lr with
                        | [] -> raise Enum.No_more_elements
                        | h :: t ->
                                lr := t;
                                h
                )
                ~count:(fun () ->
                        length !lr
                )
                ~has_next:(fun () ->
                           match !lr with
                               | [] -> false
                               | _ -> true
                )

This gets rid of the annoying O(N) count cost.

Brian