delete an element from an array

[Adam Cigánek]

> Your new example doesn't show it better, it's the only one you've given that
> shows it at all.  What you had originally was
>
>  auto a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6];
>  auto b = delete(a, 4);
>
>  assert([1, 2, 3, 4, 6] == b);
>
> which shows the removal of the element at index 4, not the element with
> value 4.

Yep, I made a typo. The last line was supposed to be
assert([1,2,3,5,6] == b). My bad.

>
> But there are further questions to be answered:
>
> - What do you want it to do if the value isn't in the array?  Just return
> the original array, return a copy of the original array, or throw an
> exception?

Good question. I would return the array unchanged (or maybe returning
range pointing to the same data as the original array). The
justification is that since I'm going to delete the element anyway, I
probably "don't care" about it, so it does not matter if it's in the
array in the first place. Throwing an exception does not seem useful
to me.

>
> - What do you want it to do if the value is in the array more than once?
>  Remove the first, remove the last, remove all of them, or pick one at
> random?

Another good question. In the end, there should probably be more
functions: deleteFirst, deleteLast, deleteAll or even deleteRandom.

adam.

>
> Stewart.
>