Adam Turoff is one of the good guys, a fine host who doesn’t mind when your wife pulls his shower tap off the wall, a wise programmer, mine of information, and an enlightening man to talk to. It was Adam who popped up in an iChat window not long after Rails got released and suggested I take a look.

So, when he started up his Notes on Haskell techblog, I subscribed immediately.

Today, Adam wrote about What’s wrong with the for loop and, as usual for him, he nailed it.

In summary, the for loop does too much. Or too little. It depends how you look at it. In a language with closures and higher order functions, there are forms of abstraction that hide the loop and bring intent to the fore, and unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, anything that helps clarify your intent can only be a good thing.

I can’t remember the last time I used a classic for loop in any of my Ruby code. In the past I’ve used

collection.each_i {|item, i| … }

when I’ve needed to iterate over parallel collections, but I discovered zip recently:

a = [1, 2] b = [:a, :b]

b.zip(a) # => [[:a, 1], [:b, 2]] b.zip(a) {|(b_item, a_item)| … }

which is so much nicer.

But, as usual, Adam puts it better than me, go read him.