SPUG: Grep syntax

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
># from Bill Campbell
># on Thursday 14 June 2007 11:39 pm:
>
>>$start0=1;
>>grep { $start0=0 unless $_ == 0; } @a;
>>
>>if ( ! $start0 ) { ...
>
>ugh.
>
>Perhaps that means:
>
>  my $start0 = ! grep({$_} @a);
>  unless($start0) { ...
>
>But that's still awfully non-un-negatedified.
>
>  if(grep({$_} @a)) { ...
>
>Isn't it?
>
>And wasn't this a discussion about how you can't do stupid stuff in 
>python?  There's nothing perlish about void-context greps and backwards 
>negated logic.  IME Perl requires you to do silly things less often 
>than other languages.  If the language supports it, you can just say 
>what you mean.

The author of the perl (Net::CIDR from CPAN) seems to like using grep as a
method of processing arrays while doing no regular expression checking.  He
also does things like this to create an array, @bcopy, the same size as @b,
populated with 255.  This also takes advantage of perl's ``magic'' where
looping through an array allows one to modify elements of the array by
manipulating $_;

my @bcopy = @b;
grep { $_ = 255 } @bcopy;

A python way of doing this is a bit less cryptic.  This is similar to the
perl method of expanding things like 'x' * n with python expanding the
single element list into a list of length len(b)

# Create array bcopy containing all 255
bcopy = [255] * len(b)

...
Bill
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