NestedForLoops is a pattern used to walk over a grid or a table.
for X in ROWS:
for Y in COLUMNS:
do-something( X, Y )
Whenever you face a table or a grid, and you want to consider each item in it, put a for loop inside of a for loop.
See also CartesianProduct
This is something extremely trivial to all programmers. It is comparable to striking a nail into wood, for a carpenter. Why am I making this page then? To demonstrate what I believe are
BlockDesignPatterns. Or, "
DesignPatterns" for code blocks. --
LionKimbro
The
ListComprehension syntax in
PythonLanguage allows nested loops in one line:
results = [do_something(x, y) for x in these for y in those]
Python's generators and tuple unpacking allow the nesting to be flattened:
locations = ((x, y) for x in rows for y in columns)
for (x, y) in locations:
do_something(x, y)
or (implementing
GameOfLife)
neighbors = ((x + dx, y + dy) for dx in (-1, 0, 1) for dy in range(-1, 0, 1) if dx != 0 or dy != 0)
alive = sum(cells[location] for location in neighbors) in (3, 4)
Wouldn't this be much more efficiently done in
JayLanguage, or similar, particularly with increases in parallelism such as afforded by the
CellProcessor?