why D matters for Bioinformatics

bearophile bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
Tue May 22 12:01:51 PDT 2012


deadalnix:
>>> http://blog.thebird.nl/?p=93
>>...
> I spreaded the word. This article is great and I 100% agree 
> with it :D

The article says:

>There are a few things I miss in D. For example pattern 
>recognition on unpacking data, which is great in Haskell, 
>Erlang, and Scala (see example 
>[http://www.scala-lang.org/node/120 ]).<

The author of that article has missed that D lacks something much 
simpler than pattern matching, and even more commonly useful. 
Currently in D you have to write something like:

int[2][] directions = [[-1, 0], [1, 0], [0, -1], [0, 1]];
foreach (sx_sy; directions) {
     immutable sx = sx_sy[0];
     immutable sy = sx_sy[1];
     // code that uses sx and sy


While a less clunky language allows you to unpack them better, 
something like:

auto directions = [tuple(-1, 0), tuple(1, 0), tuple(0, -1), 
tuple(0, 1)];
foreach (immutable (sx, sy); directions) {
     // code that uses sx and sy


If you use tuples, you want to unpack them often, it's a basic 
operation on tuples.

Bye,
bearophile


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