In Javascript, the "for (attr in this)" is often dangerous to use... I agree. That's one reason I like Coffeescript. However, I'm programming in Coffeescript and have a case where I need Javascript's "for (attr in this)". Is there a good way to do this in Coffeescript?
What I am doing now is writing a bunch of logic in embedded raw Javascript, such as:
...coffeescript here...
for (attr in this) {
if (stuff here) {
etc
}
}
It'd be nice to use as little Javascript as possible... any suggestions for how I can achieve this and maximize my use of Coffeescript?
Instead of for item in items which iterates through arrays, you can use for attr, value of object, which works more like for in from JS.
for own attr, value of this
if attr == 'foo' && value == 'bar'
console.log 'Found a foobar!'
Compiled: https://gist.github.com/62860f0c07d60320151c
It accepts both the key and the value in the loop, which is very handy. And you can insert the own keyword right after the for in order to enforce an if object.hasOwnProperty(attr) check which should filter out anything from the prototype that you don't want in there.
Squeegy's answer is correct. Let me just amend it by adding that the usual solution to JavaScript's for...in being "dangerous" (by including prototype properties) is to add a hasOwnProperty check. CoffeeScript can do this automatically using the special own keyword:
for own attr of this
...
is equivalent to the JavaScript
for (attr in this) {
if (!Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty(this, attr)) continue;
...
}
When in doubt about whether you should use for...of or for own...of, it's generally safer to use own.
You can use for x in y or for x of y depending on how you want to interpret a list of elements. The newest version of CoffeeScript aims to solve this problem, and you can read about its new use with an issue (that has since been implemented and closed) here on GitHub
Related
I'm currently working on my functional programming - I am fairly new to it. Am i using Options correctly here? I feel pretty insecure on my skills currently. I want my code to be as safe as possible - Can any one point out what am I doing wrong here or is it not that bad? My code is pretty straight forward here:
def main(args: Array[String]): Unit =
{
val file = "myFile.txt"
val myGame = Game(file) //I have my game that returns an Option here
if(myGame.isDefined) //Check if I indeed past a .txt file
{
val solutions = myGame.get.getAllSolutions() //This returns options as well
if(solutions.isDefined) //Is it possible to solve the puzzle(crossword)
{
for(i <- solutions.get){ //print all solutions to the crossword
i.solvedCrossword foreach println
}
}
}
}
-Thanks!! ^^
When using Option, it is recommended to use match case instead of calling 'isDefined' and 'get'
Instead of the java style for loop, use higher-order function:
myGame match {
case Some(allSolutions) =>
val solutions = allSolutions.getAllSolutions
solutions.foreach(_.solvedCrossword.foreach(println))
case None =>
}
As a rule of thumb, you can think of Option as a replacement for Java's null pointer. That is, in cases where you might want to use null in Java, it often makes sense to use Option in Scala.
Your Game() function uses None to represent errors. So you're not really using it as a replacement for null (at least I'd consider it poor practice for an equivalent Java method to return null there instead of throwing an exception), but as a replacement for exceptions. That's not a good use of Option because it loses error information: you can no longer differentiate between the file not existing, the file being in the wrong format or other types of errors.
Instead you should use Either. Either consists of the cases Left and Right where Right is like Option's Some, but Left differs from None in that it also takes an argument. Here that argument can be used to store information about the error. So you can create a case class containing the possible types of errors and use that as an argument to Left. Or, if you never need to handle the errors differently, but just present them to the user, you can use a string with the error message as the argument to Left instead of case classes.
In getAllSolutions you're just using None as a replacement for the empty list. That's unnecessary because the empty list needs no replacement. It's perfectly fine to just return an empty list when there are no solutions.
When it comes to interacting with the Options, you're using isDefined + get, which is a bit of an anti pattern. get can be used as a shortcut if you know that the option you have is never None, but should generally be avoided. isDefined should generally only be used in situations where you need to know whether an option contains a value, but don't need to know the value.
In cases where you need to know both whether there is a value and what that value is, you should either use pattern matching or one of Option's higher-order functions, such as map, flatMap, getOrElse (which is kind of a higher-order function if you squint a bit and consider by-name arguments as kind-of like functions). For cases where you want to do something with the value if there is one and do nothing otherwise, you can use foreach (or equivalently a for loop), but note that you really shouldn't do nothing in the error case here. You should tell the user about the error instead.
If all you need here is to print it in case all is good, you can use for-comprehension which is considered quite idiomatic Scala way
for {
myGame <- Game("mFile.txt")
solutions <- myGame.getAllSolutions()
solution <- solutions
crossword <- solution.solvedCrossword
} println(crossword)
In a friendly chat that I was having with a friend during a code review we notice that in the code there was a lot of:
unknownTypeVal match {
case asStr: String => //DO SOMETHING FOR STRING
case asInt: Integer => //DO SOMETHING FOR Integer
case asMyOwnClass: MyOwnClass => //DO SOMETHING FOR MyOwnClass
}
problem that was initially generated by methods that return Any or Option and there is no way to remove that because we are using libraries as XPath, and JSONPath, which return instances of Any or Option for a provided path.
I don't want to get into discussions of "preference", this is not an opinion question, I want to know either by standard defined preferably by Scala, or any other organization of impact, to do this kind of "type checking" in code in a more organized way, we think that this functionality can be reduced to a single function call to a method which contains a map of function and based on "something" (name of the class or something else that I do not know right now) determine how to process such parameter:
process(myAnnonimusVal: Any) = myMapOfFunct(myAnnonimusVal.getClass) //and based on the function that this will return execute such function pasing myAnnonimusVal
what is encouraged to do by Scala devs or Scala community
In principle, match is the cleanest way to execute code conditional on matching the Any type to something else. Any chain of if-else, instanceOf, etc is bound to turn out to be even more cumbersome and less elegant. A possible exception is a case where you know what the actual type is and can act accordingly, where a direct cast might be permissible.
That said, if you find yourself making the same matches many times, you might as well encapsulate the match in order to avoid code repetition. A partial function might be exactly what you have in mind here.
I want to perform some logic if the value of an option is set.
Coming from a java background, I used:
if (opt.nonEmpty) {
//something
}
Going a little further into scala, I can write that as:
opt.foreach(o => {
//something
})
Which one is better? The "foreach" one sounds more "idiomatic" and less Java, but it is less readable - "foreach" applied to a single value sounds weird.
Your example is not complete and you don't use minimal syntax. Just compare these two versions:
if (opt.nonEmpty) {
val o = opt.get
// ...
}
// vs
opt foreach {
o => // ...
}
and
if (opt.nonEmpty)
doSomething(opt.get)
// vs
opt foreach doSomething
In both versions there is more syntactic overhead in the if solution, but I agree that foreach on an Option can be confusing if you think of it only as an optional value.
Instead foreach describes that you want to do some sort of side effects, which makes a lot of sense if you think of Option being a monad and foreach just a method to transform it. Using foreach has furthermore the great advantage that it makes refactorings easier - you can just change its type to a List or any other monad and you will not get any compiler errors (because of Scalas great collections library you are not constrained to use only operations that work on monads, there are a lot of methods defined on a lot of types).
foreach does make sense, if you think of Option as being like a List, but with a maximum of one element.
A neater style, IMO, is to use a for-comprehension:
for (o <- opt) {
something(o)
}
foreach makes sense if you consider Option to be a list that can contain at most a single value. This also leads to a correct intuition about many other methods that are available to Option.
I can think of at least one important reason you might want to prefer foreach in this case: it removes possible run-time errors. With the nonEmpty approach, you'll at one point have to do a get*, which can crash your program spectacularly if you by accident forget to check for emptiness one time.
If you completely erase get from your mind to avoid bugs of that kind, a side effect is that you also have less use for nonEmpty! And you'll start to enjoy foreach and let the compiler take care of what should happen if the Option happens to be empty.
You'll see this concept cropping up in other places. You would never do
if (age.nonEmpty)
Some(age.get >= 18)
else
None
What you'll rather see is
age.map(_ >= 18)
The principle is that you want to avoid having to write code that handles the failure case – you want to offload that burden to the compiler. Many will tell you that you should never use get, however careful you think you are about pre-checking. So that makes things easier.
* Unless you actually just want to know whether or not the Option contains a value and don't really care for the value, in which case nonEmpty is just fine. In that case it serves as a sort of toBoolean.
Things I didn't find in the other answers:
When using if, I prefer if (opt isDefined) to if (opt nonEmpty) as the former is less collection-like and makes it more clear we're dealing with an option, but that may be a matter of taste.
if and foreach are different in the sense that if is an expression that will return a value while foreach returns Unit. So in a certain way using foreach is even more java-like than if, as java has a foreach loop and java's if is not an expression. Using a for comprehension is more scala-like.
You can also use pattern matching (but this is also also less idiomatic)
You can use the fold method, which takes two functions so you can evaluate one expression in the Some case and another in the None case. You may need to explicitly specify the expected type because of how type inference works (as shown here). So in my opinion it may sometimes still be clearer to use either pattern matching or val result = if (opt isDefined) expression1 else expression2.
If you don't need a return value and really have no need to handle the not-defined case, you can use foreach.
Consider this code
_bindEvents: ->
#input.bind 'keyup', =>
#filter($(this).val())
if $this .val() is ''
#clearBtn.hide()
else
#clearBtn.show()
it's clear to me that '#' represents '_this.' so it references the parent scope, but what if i need the 'inner this'.
Like this line:
#filter($(this).val())
compiles to this:
_this.filter($(_this).val()); // $(_this)
and I need this:
_this.filter($(this).val()); // $(this)
Is there a way to do that without using the thin arrow and saving the this reference by hand using a closue (that = this)?
AFAIK there's no way to do that; and I would warn against it for a couple reasons:
ease-of-understanding: When you use a hash rocket (=>), you're effectively telling the reader that you need/want to preserve the current value of this; re-introducing a second this confuses that.
future-compatibility: From my understanding, the next ECMAScript spec is to support => in a way that it doesn't even introduce a new this. (And I wouldn't be surprised if CoffeeScript directly adopts the new
arrow syntax when that feature lands)
A thin arrow w/ explicit referencing will probably make things more clear in the end.
You can always hack this using embedded javascript:
`var second_this = this;`
#filter($(second_this).val())
So I'm wrapping bits of the Mechanical Turk API, and you need to specify qualification requirements such as:
Worker_Locale == "US"
Worker_PercentAssignmentsApproved > 95
...
In my code, I'd like to allow the syntax above and have these translated into something like:
QualificationRequirement("00000000000000000071", "LocaleValue.Country", "EqualTo", "US")
QualificationRequirement("000000000000000000L0", "IntegerValue", "GreaterThan", 95)
I can achieve most of what I want by declaring an object like:
object Worker_PercentAssignmentsApproved {
def >(x: Int) = {
QualificationRequirement("000000000000000000L0", "IntegerValue", "GreaterThan", x)
}
}
But I can't do the same thing for the "==" (equals) or "!=" (not equals) methods since they're declared final in AnyRef. Is there a standard workaround for this? Perhaps I should just use "===" and "!==" instead?
(I guess one good answer might be a summary of how a few different scala DSLs have chosen to work around this issue and then I can just do whatever the majority of those do.)
Edit: Note that I'm not trying to actually perform an equality comparison. Instead, I'm trying to observe the comparison operator the user indicated in scala code, save an object based description of that comparison, and give that description to the server. Specifically, the following scala code:
Worker_Locale == "US"
will result in the following parameters being added to my request:
&QualificationRequirement.1.QualificationTypeId=000000000000000000L0
&QualificationRequirement.1.Comparator=EqualTo
&QualificationRequirement.1.LocaleValue.Country=US
So I can't override equals since it returns a Boolean, and I need to return a structure that represents all these parameters.
If you look at the definition of == and != in the scala reference, (§ 12.1), you’ll find that they are defined in terms of eq and equals.
eq is the reference equality and is also final (it is only used to check for null in that case) but you should be able to override equals.
Note that you’ll probably also need to write the hashCode method to ensure
∀ o1, o2 with o1.equals(o2) ⇒ (o1.hashCode.equals(o2.hashCode)).
However, if you need some other return type for your DSL than Boolean or more flexibility in general, you should maybe use ===, as has been done in Squeryl for example.
Here's a little survey of what various DSLs use for this kind of thing.
Liftweb uses === in Javascript expressions:
JsIf(ValById("username") === value.toLowerCase, ...)
Squeryl uses === for SQL expressions:
authors.where(a=> a.lastName === "Pouchkine")
querydsl uses $eq for SQL expressions:
person.firstName $eq "Ben"
Prolog-in-Scala uses === for Prolog expressions:
'Z === 'A
Scalatest uses === to get an Option instead of a Boolean:
assert("hello" === "world")
So I think the consensus is mostly to use ===.
I've been considering a similar problem. I was thinking of creating a DSL for writing domain-specific formulas. The trouble is that users might want to do string manipulation too and you end up with expression like
"some string" + <someDslConstruct>
No matter what you do its going to lex this as a something like
stringToLiteralString("some string" + <someDslConstruct>)
I think the only potential way out of this pit would be to try using macros. In your example perhaps you could have a macro that wraps a scala expression and converts the raw AST into a query? Doing this for arbitrary expressions wouldn't be feasible but if your domain is sufficiently well constrained it might be a workable alternative solution.