SKILL equivalent of TCL "splatter" operator

Hi Lior,

Interesting - I'm not familiar with the 'splatter' operator in Tcl (and I know Tcl pretty well), but the way to do this in SKILL is to use the apply function: apply('proc1 list1).

E.g. apply('plus list(1 2 3)) => 6

Hopefully this does what you want. BTW, I'm assuming that the 'list2' above is a typo.

Best regards,
Lawrence.

It is a typo.
Thanks, They need to make the documentation a little clearer. I actually looked at this function, and did not understand it. BTW, Splatter is the fastest way in Tcl (until 8.6) to append 2 lists together. I.e. Let us say that you have list1 and list2. You want to add list2 to list 1, in a way that the length of list1 is the length of list1 + the length of list2, and not having 1 more element in list1, which is list2. There are 2 ways to do that:
1. foreach elem $list2 { lappend list1 $elem }
2. lappend list1 {*}$list2
The second option will run faster. Ruby has it too.

Lior,

This was also covered in the advanced SKILL course in a section on lambda, apply and funcall.

I think the documentation is fairly clear if you look at the examples, although whether you'd find it just by keyword searching I'm less sure!

Regards,

Andrew

Hi Andrew.
I did the keyword search. I remembered something about that, but the labs were out of my reach.

Hi Lior,

I'm only teasing ;-)

Obviously big languages like Tcl have the benefit of many more resources (such as stackoverflow) which help to answer such questions. However, this is one of those things that require your muscle memory to be trained when you're using a language - then they become natural.

That said, a google search for "skill call function with list of arguments" finds (a handful of hits down) one of Jim's blogs

which mentions apply for this - in fact it's covered in more detail in part 1 (linked to from that, of course) which also leads to this general Wikipedia reference as apply is used in many languages based on lambda calculus.

What's even more amusing is the reference to Tcl on that wikipedia page:

Regards,

Andrew