Types of for loops - part one

I have already discussed the basic for loop in my last post, but in Uniface 9.5 there were a number of other list constructs made available, which I plan to investigate over the next few posts, having never used them before.  


I wrote a post a couple of months ago entitled Performance of list processing, which looked at different ways of looping through a Uniface list of values.  In this post I determined that one of the quickest ways was a while loop with a counter, using getitem to extract each value in turn, something like this...


  count = 0

  $status = 1

  while ( $status > 0 )

    count = count+1

    getitem temp,list,count

    ;do something

  endwhile

However, one of the new constructs is forlist, which can be used to the same affect...

  forlist temp,count in list

    ;do something

  endfor

As you can see, the code is much more concise.  There is no need to initialise the count variable or  $status, everything is done as part of the forlist statement, and the incrementing and extracting are done automatically.  The "count" variable is optional, if you don't need it then you don't need to include it.

It is also possible to do the same thing when you have an ID list, where the same construct will return both the ID and the value of each item in the list separately...


  forlist/id id,temp,count in list

    ;do something

  endfor

The "count" variable is also optional in this case.  You know what's coming next...

So let's test these three blocks of code over 2,000,000 iterations...

• while = 01:18.47, 01:17.55, 01:18.11 (around 1 minute 18 seconds)
• forlist = 01:08.06, 01:08.51, 01:08.42 (just over 1 minute 8 seconds)
• forlist/id = 01:17.27, 01:18.03, 01:17.26 (just over 1 minute 17 seconds)

As you can see, forlist is not only more concise from a coding perspective, but it also performs better.  Given the number of iterations, the performance gain would probably be limited, but it is clearly the better option.

Summary: Whilst I have previously always used while loops, I shall now be considering switching the forlist loops, for iterating through a list.