Array Concatenation

[CodaFi]

For the concat example, it would be trivial to create a loop and just copy the values onto the end of the first array, but there are some opportunities for a concat operator to be built into the language:

1. ..= The dedicated concat operator for strings could be overloaded to work with arrays, as in:

var array1 = array(1, 2, 3);
array1 ..= array(1, 2, 3,);

2. A concat() function built into the STL as in:

var array = concat(array1, array2);

3. += could be overloaded as in:

var array1 = array(1, 2, 3);
array1 += array(1, 2, 3,);

All of which would need to be mirrored in the implementation with some kind of spn_array_concat(..);.

[H2CO3]

Yay! An stdlib function seems reasonable.

[CodaFi]

Ah, wait, because strings and arrays are (sort of) the same in the repl, shouldn't join() work?

[H2CO3]

Just because I know your background: join is a less fancy name for componentsJoinedByString: :P So, no.

[CodaFi]

OK. Then I didn't just make a new feature branch for this for nothing :)

[C0deH4cker]

I personally prefer option 1 and believe it would be easiest to understand (since .. means concatenate in other parts of the language). I would also like to propose another suggestion:

var array1 = array(1, 2, 3);
var array2 = array(4, 5, 6);
array1.append(array2);

So array1 would now contain [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. This is based off of Python, where you can do list1.append(list2).

[H2CO3]

Yup, and strings are very similar to arrays in many other aspects as well... (maybe I should make the indexof() standard library function accept arrays too.)