Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Be A Web Developer

Big Picture of the XML Family of Specifications by Ken Sall

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Lists and arrays in Dart

(This is Part 3 in a series about Dart. Check out Part 2, Function in Dart .) Warning : We expect the Dart libraries to undergo potentially sweeping changes before Dart goes to alpha. This document is relevant as of 2011-12-22. Intro Dart is a "batteries included" effort to help app developers build modern web apps. An important "battery" is the bundled core Dart libraries, providing common and rich functionality. Dart is building a solution for large, complex web apps, and providing well tested, integrated, and common libraries is key to helping a web app developer be more productive out of the box. The Collection libraries are a crucial set of APIs that Dart developers get for free. Much more than simple arrays and maps, the Collection library includes standard ways to filter, iterate, inspect, compose, and sort your data. This post specifically looks at List<E> , Dart's ordered, indexable collection of objects. Aside: The Dart project is lucky
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Converting Array to List in Scala

Now, this has to have a built-in somewhere in Scala , because it just seems too common. So, how to convert an Array to a List in Scala? Why do I need this? I needed to drop to Java for some functionality, which in this case returns an Array. I wanted to get that Array into a List to practice my functional programming skillz. **Update**: I figured out how to convert Arrays to Lists the Scala way. Turns out it's a piece of cake. val myList = List.fromArray(Array("one", "two", "three")) or val myList = Array("one","two","three").elements.toList The call to elements returns an Iterator , and from there you can convert to a List via toList . Nice. Because my first version wasn't actually tail recursive, what follows is a true tail recursive solution, if I were to implement this by hand. The above, built in mechanism is much better, though. object ArrayUtil { def toList[a](array: Array[a]): List[a] = { d
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Null-aware operators in Dart

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Three new language features just landed in the latest dev channel build of the Dart ! Collectively known as null-aware operators , these new features will help you reduce the code required to work with potentially null objects. I'm excited for these new abilities, because typing less is always a good thing. Read on to learn more, and be sure to try these new features on Dart Pad . ?? Use ?? when you want to evaluate and return an expression IFF another expression resolves to null. exp ?? otherExp is similar to ((x) => x == null ? otherExp : x)(exp) ??= Use ??= when you want to assign a value to an object IFF that object is null. Otherwise, return the object. obj ??= value is similar to ((x) => x == null ? obj = value : x)(obj) ?. Use ?. when you want to call a method/getter on an object IFF that object is not null (otherwise, return null). obj?.method() is similar to ((x) => x == null ? null : x.method())(obj) Yo
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