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Technology

PHP Functional Programming – A code snippet

Given a string of comma-separated values, how do you convert each of them into a link of the form:
<a href=”http://–item–.google.com/”>–item–
and return a comma-separated list of these strings?

Snippet 1:

<?php
//Make these links to google.com

$string = "news,reader,mail";

$array_of_string = split(",",$string);

$final = array();

foreach($array_of_string as $item){
	$final[] = "<a href='http://".$item.".google.com/'>$item</a>";
}

echo implode(", ",$final);
?>

Snippet 2 (uses functional constructs):

<?php

//Make these links to google.com

$string = "news,reader,mail";

$array_of_string = split(",",$string);

echo implode(", ",
		array_map(
			create_function('$item',
	'return "<a href='http://".$item.".google.com/'>$item";'
					),$array_of_string
			)
		);

?>
Categories
Technology

Groovy – a cool JVM based scripting language

Ever thought you are so addicted to Java that although the world is talking about moving to functional languages, you just cannot see yourself leaving the JVM?

Well, as Jerry put it, Groovy could be your solution. You can still use the JVM, but instead of Java, use Groovy as your programming language.

Are there any compelling reasons to move to Groovy or even away from Java to any of the scripting languages on the JVM?

Well, I wouldn't consider myself to be an expert in Java, or any programming language, but from the little experience that I have, I should say, there are some reasons I can think of.

Some time back, we had this requirement. We were doing some project on Eclipse and we had to make changes to a basic Eclipse object because an assumption made by the Eclipse architecture was not true for us. Were we trying to break the architecture of Eclipse? May be. Why were we trying to do it? Well, technological coolness!

Anyway, the point is, this is not possible without actually downloading the source and then making the modification and asking users to replace the original JAR containing that object with ours. Or we need to ask the Eclipse community to accept our change and it might not be a compelling reason for the community. Is there a simpler solution?

How would it be if it was possible to modify this object during runtime and not require anyone to replace the JARs?

Well, although I have not tried it, I am sure it is quite easy to do this with a functional language. I have done some similar changes to Dojo using the 'prototype' property.

There are simpler reasons than that. Java sometimes can get really painful. Remember how painful it is to simply replace backslashes in Java? Remember how painful it is to obtain a substring from the 2nd character at the beginning to the last but one character at the end? Remember how painful it is to write a string of HTML to the response from a servlet? Can setters/getters be simpler? Can XML document creation be simpler?

With the world talking about byte-code modification, metaprogramming and scripting languages on the JVM, Java is becoming more of a platform language than a core programming language. It is more like what C/C++ was about 10 years back and what assembly was before that.

So back to my question on why Groovy.
The Groovy guys have answered it elegantly. Here are the reasons that I found to be the most compelling:
1. It has functional aspects.
2. The syntax is neat and consistent.
3. It is Java based. It is easy to move back to Java if I ever need to. Groovy is completely interoperable with Java and reuses a lot of the Java semantics. If you really need to get this, you should see this tutorial.

So go ahead and give it a try! Who knows, you may soon start to wonder why you were doing Java programming all these days!

Categories
Technology

Now how do you do this in functional programming

Consider the following piece of code:

...
int flag=0;
for(int i=0;i<10;i++){
   if(val==arr[i]){
      flag=1;
      break;
   }
}
if(flag==1){
   System.out.println("Found.");
}
else{
   System.out.println("Not found.");
}
...

In functional programming, we cannot assign values to variables; variables can only be initialized. So I can't use a 'flag', the reason being that if I initialize the 'flag' outside the for, I can't change its value inside the for and if I initialize the 'flag' inside the for, I can't use it outside because of scoping.

For people new to functional programming, here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Functional programming languages have the following features (or should I call it restrictions?):

...Functional programming can be contrasted with imperative programming. Functional programming appears to be missing several constructs often (though incorrectly) considered essential to an imperative language such as C or Pascal. For example, in strict functional programming, there is no explicit memory allocation and no explicit variable assignment. However, these operations occur automatically when a function is invoked: memory allocation occurs to create space for the parameters and the return value, and assignment occurs to copy the parameters into this newly allocated space and to copy the return value back into the calling function. Both operations can only occur on function entry and exit, so side effects of function evaluation are eliminated.

I had such a requirement in my program. I was using XSLT to program something and I came across this requirement. (XSLT is also a functional programming language). I then used some XPath constructs to solve it but wondered if there is a standard way to solve it in functional programming languages.

I am new to functional programming (although I have been doing XSLT scripting for the last 1 year) and I am still looking for a standard solution to this pattern.