Support for binding

[Caleb Meredith]

This is related to #1

Can this library allow the user to do something like this:

iterable::map(identity)::forEach(console.log)

…under this proposal: https://github.com/zenparsing/es-function-bind

I envision that when the proposal gets adopted a library that does this will be needed. iterall could be that library. As a note, RxJS already allows for this type of function application: http://reactivex.io/rxjs/manual/installation.html

[Lee Byron]

Do you mean that you want to use this library's forEach function using the function-bind syntax?

To answer concretely, currently there is no support for function-bind since the forEach function expects an iterable/array-like as the first argument rather than using the bound-this as the expected iterable/array-like. If that proposal becomes accepted in a version of JavaScript and this becomes a requested feature, then a version of the forEach function which supports it could be added.

If you wanted, you could use this wrapper to try it out:

import { forEach as _forEach } from 'iterall';
function forEach(fn) { return _forEach(this, fn) }

myIterable::forEach(console.log)

However I also think that function-binding support is probably not going to be a desired feature for this library since it's purpose is to provide a general purpose function for operating over any iterable/array-like - typically within other libraries - and the function-bind syntax does not provide much value for this case.

What's probably more likely is that other libraries which provide higher order functions for iterables and do support function-bind might benefit from this library's createIterator function:

import { createIterator } from 'iterall';
import { map, filter, forEach } from 'someotherlib';

createIterator(something)::map(fn)::filter(fn)::forEach(fn)

[Lee Byron]

Closing, but feel free to discuss further.

[Caleb Meredith]

So then what's this library's unique advantage over Array.from + a polyfill? The low level support is already in the stdlib, what we need now is higher level functions.