Comment by swiftcoder
3 hours ago
This is one of those rare times when I read something coming out of the FP community and go "oh, you mean iterators, we've had those for decades over here in imperative-programming land"
3 hours ago
This is one of those rare times when I read something coming out of the FP community and go "oh, you mean iterators, we've had those for decades over here in imperative-programming land"
Traditional FP has had functional equivalents to iterators since before most imperative languages existed. LISP had a map function (MAPCAR) in its earliest versions, in the 1950s. Later that was generalized to folds, and the underlying structures were generalized from linked lists to arbitrary “traversable” types, including unbounded streams.
The language in the OP is a special-purpose language for data parallelism, targeting GPUs, and explicitly described as “not intended to replace existing general-purpose languages” (quote from the language’s home page.) As such, it has requirements and constraints that most languages don’t have. Looking at its design through a general-purpose languages lens doesn’t necessarily make sense.