kopax

While attempting to explain JavaScript's reduce method on arrays, conceptually, I came up with the following - hopefully it's helpful; happy to tweak it if anyone has suggestions.

Intro

JavaScript Arrays have lots of built in methods on their prototype. Some of them mutate - ie, they change the underlying array in-place. Luckily, most of them do not - they instead return an entirely distinct array. Since arrays are conceptually a contiguous list of items, it helps code clarity and maintainability a lot to be able to operate on them in a "functional" way. (I'll also insist on referring to an array as a "list" - although in some languages, List is a native data type, in JS and this post, I'm referring to the concept. Everywhere I use the word "list" you can assume I'm talking about a JS Array) This means, to perform a single operation on the list as a whole ("atomically"), and to return a new list - thus making it much simpler to think about both the old list and the new one, what they contain, and

kopax

#!/bin/sh
parse_yaml() {
   local prefix=$2
   local s='[[:space:]]*' w='[a-zA-Z0-9_]*' fs=$(echo @|tr @ '\034')
   sed -ne "s|^\($s\)\($w\)$s:$s\"\(.*\)\"$s\$|\1$fs\2$fs\3|p" \
        -e "s|^\($s\)\($w\)$s:$s\(.*\)$s\$|\1$fs\2$fs\3|p"  $1 |
   awk -F$fs '{
      indent = length($1)/2;
      vname[indent] = $2;
      for (i in vname) {if (i > indent) {delete vname[i]}}