Lazy evaluation helping implementation of transform by mask in Kap
This is one of those occasions where I can point to a specific feature in Dyalog APL, and use that to discuss some feature of Kap.
This time I'd like to mention the At operator in Dyalog. It can be used to update a subset of an array by a function, where the values to be updated are selected using a binary mask (the same function can also be used to select cells by coordinate, but that's outside the scope of this post).
Let's say you have an array with two columns and some number of rows:
foo
┏━━━━━━━┓
┃"abc" 1┃
┃"def" 2┃
┃"ghi" 3┃
┃"jkl" 4┃
┗━━━━━━━┛
You now wish to add 1 to the values in the second column. In order to do this we create a boolean mask that is true in all cells that you want to update. Since this is a simple case of a two-column array, the simplest solution is probably:
(⍴foo) ⍴ 0 1
┏━━━┓
┃0 1┃
┃0 1┃
┃0 1┃
┃0 1┃
┗━━━┛
In Dyalog APL, the way to use the At operator to achieve this is as follows:
{⍵+1}@{(⍴⍵) ⍴ 0 1} foo
┌→────────┐
↓ ┌→──┐ │
│ │abc│ 2 │
│ └───┘ │
│ ┌→──┐ │
│ │def│ 3 │
│ └───┘ │
│ ┌→──┐ │
│ │ghi│ 4 │
│ └───┘ │
│ ┌→──┐ │
│ │jkl│ 5 │
│ └───┘ │
└∊────────┘
As mentioned above, the At operator have several different variations, and the one used here is the type where both the left and right arguments are functions. The right function accepts the array as an argument and returns the boolean mask that selects what values to operate on. The left argument is a function that is evaluated for each selected value.
Kap currently does not implement the At operator. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to do selection by mask. We just have to take advantage of two different features: The Case function and lazy evaluation.
Lazy evaluation was described in the previous post, so let's have a look at the Case function first.
Case function
The Case function (%) was inspired by Dzaima/APL. It accepts an array of indices and a list of arrays, each with the same shape as the index array, and for each cell in the index, pick a corresponding value in one of the subarrays.
An example will hopefully make this more clear:
0 1 1 2 % "abcd" "1234" "defg"
"a23g"
The behaviour of this function should be reasonably clear. The first cell in the left argument is 0, so it picks the first element of the first array in the right argument. The second cell is 1, so the second value is picked from the second array, and so on.
If the left argument is a boolean array, then that is merely a specialisation of the general case described above where there are only two arrays in the right argument.
Selection by mask in Kap
Based on the description above, it should be obvious how the selection part can be achieved using Case. However, we also want conditional execution. This actually happens automatically thanks to the fact that lazy evaluation is available. Here is the solution in Kap:
((⍴foo) ⍴ 0 1) % foo ({⍵+1}¨ foo)
┏━━━━━━━┓
┃"abc" 2┃
┃"def" 3┃
┃"ghi" 4┃
┃"jkl" 5┃
┗━━━━━━━┛
The reason this works is because the function {⍵+1} is only evaluated for the cells that are actually used in the result. If this wasn't the case, the above would raise an error when an attempt is made to add 1 to a string.
The above was an example of cases where lazy evaluation isn't just an optimisation, but is a central feature required to perform certain operations.