Thursday, October 08, 2009

LINQ has your Schwartzian transform right here...

I was looking around for how to do a decorate-sort-undecorate in .Net. Eventually I realized (yeah, yeah, sometimes I'm slow to catch on) that the LINQ "orderby" clause actually makes it incredibly easy. For instance, if you had some table rows from a database query that you needed to sort according to how the values of one of the columns are ordered in an arbitrary external collection...

var sortedRows = from rw in queryResults.AsEnumerable()
orderby externalCollection.IndexOf((string) rw["columnName"])
select rw;

Oh brave new world, that has such query clauses in it! Back when I first read about the Schwartzian transform in Perl, with its hot "map-on-map" action, it took a little while for me to decipher it (my education up to that point had been almost entirely in the imperative paradigm with some elementary OO dashed in).

Between this and not having to learn about pointers, either, programmers who start out today have it too easy. Toss 'em in the C, I say...

UPDATE: Old news. Obviously, others have noticed this long before, and more importantly taken the steps of empirically confirming that LINQ does a Schwartzian under the covers. (I just assumed it was because my mental model of LINQ is of the clauses transforming sequences into new sequences, not ever doing things in-place.)

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