Re: vector-last / vector-ref with negative indices?

[Aleix Conchillo Flaqué]

Thank you for the replies. I ended up sending a patch to add support
for (vector-last) since I found it useful.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2020-12/msg00009.html

Aleix

On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 10:58 PM Aleix Conchillo Flaqué
<aconchillo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> This month I'm trying to go through Advent Of Code one more year
> (previous years I didn't get too far) and I've been finding myself
> writing the same patterns multiple times that could be avoided by just
> having a helper function.
>
> One of them is getting the last element of a vector. It is a quite
> common operation when solving these types of problems. For example
> Python as you might know uses negative indices.
>
> I have looked around and haven't seen it (unless I completely missed
> it which would be shameful) but wouldn't it be good to have this
> built-in by default?
>
> Instead of having to write:
>
> (vector-ref v (- (vector-length v) 1))
>
> you would write:
>
> (vector-last v) or even better (vector-ref v -1).
>
> Interestingly Racket doesn't offer those functions either as far as I can 
> tell.
>
> Basic use case? Get the maximum element of a sorted vector which would
> be done in constant time.
>
> I'm trying to solve the problems idiomatically, to the best of my
> limited knowledge, with Scheme. It is possible that the times I'm
> using vectors I should think about it differently and not use them,
> but I'm not 100% sure.
>
> What am I missing?
>
> Thank you in advance,
>
> Aleix