Julia Language Iterables Combining Lazy Iterables
Example
The standard library comes with a rich collection of lazy iterables (and libraries such as Iterators.jl provide even more). Lazy iterables can be composed to create more powerful iterables in constant time. The most important lazy iterables are take and drop, from which many other functions can be created.
Lazily slice an iterable
Arrays can be sliced with slice notation. For instance, the following returns the 10th to 15th elements of an array, inclusive:
A[10:15]
However, slice notation does not work with all iterables. For instance, we cannot slice a generator expression:
julia> (i^2 for i in 1:10)[3:5]
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching getindex(::Base.Generator{UnitRange{Int64},##1#2}, ::UnitRange{Int64})
Slicing strings may not have the expected Unicode behaviour:
julia> "αααα"[2:3]
ERROR: UnicodeError: invalid character index
in getindex(::String, ::UnitRange{Int64}) at ./strings/string.jl:130
julia> "αααα"[3:4]
"α"
We can define a function lazysub(itr, range::UnitRange) to do this kind of slicing on arbitrary iterables. This is defined in terms of take and drop:
lazysub(itr, r::UnitRange) = take(drop(itr, first(r) - 1), last(r) - first(r) + 1)
The implementation here works because for UnitRange value a:b, the following steps are performed:
- drops the first
a-1elements - takes the
ath element,a+1th element, and so forth, until thea+(b-a)=bth element
In total, b-a elements are taken. We can confirm our implementation is correct in each case above:
julia> collect(lazysub("αααα", 2:3))
2-element Array{Char,1}:
'α'
'α'
julia> collect(lazysub((i^2 for i in 1:10), 3:5))
3-element Array{Int64,1}:
9
16
25
Lazily shift an iterable circularly
The circshift operation on arrays will shift the array as if it were a circle, then relinearize it. For example,
julia> circshift(1:10, 3)
10-element Array{Int64,1}:
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Can we do this lazily for all iterables? We can use the cycle, drop, and take iterables to implement this functionality.
lazycircshift(itr, n) = take(drop(cycle(itr), length(itr) - n), length(itr))
Along with lazy types being more performant in many situations, this lets us do circshift-like functionality on types that would otherwise not support it:
julia> circshift("Hello, World!", 3)
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching circshift(::String, ::Int64)
Closest candidates are:
circshift(::AbstractArray{T,N}, ::Real) at abstractarraymath.jl:162
circshift(::AbstractArray{T,N}, ::Any) at abstractarraymath.jl:195
julia> String(collect(lazycircshift("Hello, World!", 3)))
"ld!Hello, Wor"
0.5.0
Making a multiplication table
Let's make a multiplication table using lazy iterable functions to create a matrix.
The key functions to use here are:
Base.product, which computes a Cartesian product.prod, which computes a regular product (as in multiplication):, which creates a rangemap, which is a higher order function applying a function to each element of a collection
The solution is:
julia> map(prod, Base.product(1:10, 1:10))
10×10 Array{Int64,2}:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30
4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60
7 14 21 28 35 42 49 56 63 70
8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 72 80
9 18 27 36 45 54 63 72 81 90
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
