If you’re reading this hoping that I’m done with droning on about array-languages, close the tab… it only gets worse from here. If you thought APL was unreadable, even after my earlier blog posts, again - close button is right there. In this post I try out a brand new stack-based array language and continue to advocate for learning such things.
I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds these days - it’s certainly making a comeback, and it’s great to see developers returning to blogging outside of paid platforms. Keeping up with all of those posts, however, does take quite a bit of time. So when I find one I do really find engaging, I do my best to dig in.
This post by Hillel Wayne wasn’t specifically interesting (my dance card for learning new languages is already pretty full, but I can’t help looking at others) but it did present a small, bite-sized puzzle to solve; what’s a simple way to “generate 5 random 10-character strings”. Now, that’s pretty much a code-golf question right there. Hillel presents a solution in Raku (a.k.a. Perl 6 - note the “p” and “6” in the Raku logo) as a “quick” solution
for ^5 {say ('a'..'z').roll(10).join}dmjfpwxspu
vernmlljkw
korntotesp
rkpewsoqjn
blswvrudenand I can’t argue with that - it’s readable (even though I don’t know much Perl/Raku), I can
reason about what and how it’s doing what it’s doing (making an educated guess about ^ which
is indeed a range operation and say being
an output method; roll is a nice choice for random selection).
When I see problems like this, I start to think through what tools I could use to solve it. I still default to R because it’s the language I know best, but my first attempt isn’t nearly as concise
sapply(1:5, \(x) paste0(sample(letters, 10, replace = TRUE), collapse = ""))## [1] "kcqicytylm" "peybjcbumk" "bbvhibgqjs" "uzbpzrkywp" "zettlmjghm"I do like that R has letters (and LETTERS) as built-in structures; that makes things a
little easier. I could write that just as easily as a for-loop, especially since I don’t
actually need an argument to the anonymous function
for (i in 1:5) {
print(
paste0(
sample(letters, 10, replace = TRUE),
collapse = ""
)
)
}## [1] "zwwpihqipr"
## [1] "cxunwvojaq"
## [1] "xlkcubjysw"
## [1] "ilpohtgcag"
## [1] "ralzlrszen"Side-by-side, these aren’t all that different…
R defaults to replace = FALSE which needs adjusting, and doesn’t like concatenating
strings quite so easily as join(), but otherwise the translation is fairly
straightforward. The Raku version is shorter, for sure.
I could probably go and try a few other languages, but I’m all too tempted to try APL. Unfortunately, tryapl.org seems to be down, but then I remembered… New on the scene is Uiua (pronounced “wee-wuh”) following the footsteps of other APL-descendants such as BQN. This was covered by The Array Cast panel who interviewed the author, as well as Conor from the same group in several videos.
The idea of a stack-based language is that you put some data “on the stack” then you no longer need to refer to arguments; a monadic function just applies to whatever is on the top of the stack. A dyadic function just applies to to the top two pieces of data on the stack. Need another copy of your data somewhere in your processing? Just duplicate it on the stack.
The way this works in practice is you “read” from right-to-left (same as APL), so if we
put the values 2 and 3 on the stack then use the dyadic + function
+ 3 25Similar to APL, this language uses glyphs for primitive functions, but a really nice
feature is writing out the “name” of the function you want (in the above case, add) which
the interpreter will convert to the glyph for you, so
add 3 25produces the same code (with glyphs) and output.
Working with a stack would certainly be something different for me, but I figured it’s
worth a try! The first hurdle came quickly; how do I get the letters of the alphabet?
Reading through the examples, I found that I can specify a string literal with @, and
Uiua supports some arithmetic on these so this works
+ @a 1
+ @a 25@b
@zNext, I needed to generate all the letters, and thankfully, adding a range from 1 to 25
(⇡26) works
+@a⇡26"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"Note that you can also use add @a range 26 - the interpreter inserts the glyphs for you.
Next, I need a way to sample 10 letters from this. There’s a rand function
(the glyph looks like a dice - nice!) but it only produces a single value
between 0 and 1. Additionally, I need to run this several times to get the 10
values. The front page of the website has a nice example demonstrating exactly
this, so that helps. It uses rand (⚂) and repeat (⍥) to generate 5
random numbers between 0 and 1, then mult (×) to bring the range up to 0 to
10, then finally floor (⌊) to return to integers.
⌊×10[⍥⚂5][5 3 7 8 4]In my case, I want to generate 10 values and I need to multiply by 26 to have the right indices
⌊×26[⍥⚂10]+@a⇡26"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
[10 25 23 20 4 25 15 2 24 24]The values on the stack are then the letters of the alphabet, and 10 indices to be selected.
This is where I had to pause and think - how do I repeat this 5 times? There’s no loops (I don’t think). Then I realised - this is an array language… I should be leveraging that!
Instead of asking for 10 indices, I can ask for 50. Then, I just need to reshape (↯)
these 50 values into 5 groups of 10
↯5_10⌊×26[⍥⚂50]+@a⇡26"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
╭─
╷ 21 19 4 18 2 24 6 1 2 6
0 12 1 1 12 2 12 7 12 0
5 1 19 6 22 19 23 18 12 25
20 13 10 19 17 2 12 1 16 4
9 24 6 9 18 6 21 18 23 1
╯Now, there are two data objects on the stack; the alphabet, and an array of indices to be
selected. A dyadic select (⊏) will take these two objects, and select elements of the
first based on indices of the second, and voila!
⊏↯5_10⌊×26[⍥⚂50]+@a⇡26╭─
╷ "gewctqbttq"
"vsbvzbqiod"
"wpmkmnuxwz"
"rymyxzqibo"
"zxtnpadwvl"
╯That’s a walkthrough of the glyphs in my final solution - you can play with it on the website yourself - but one could enter those function names in full and the interpreter will figure it out for you
select reshape 5_10 floor mult 26[repeat rand 50] add @a range 26
...
⊏ ↯ 5_10 ⌊ × 26[⍥⚂ 50] + @a ⇡ 26╭─
╷ "wtyefkiavu"
"gfllwkuqcn"
"qydoiyqprk"
"awvdxdsymj"
"zzvueychem"
╯I know people like to say this is “unreadable” but with a little colour, a lot of the elements of the Raku and R solutions are here
So… is that more concise than the R or even Raku solutions? Gosh, no. BUT, I had a lot more fun writing it. For certain problems, APL-like languages really do have a lot to offer, and for all I know there’s a much better way to spell this in very few glyphs that I’ve overlooked (feel free to send me one!).
You can make quite complex things; the Uiua logo itself - made in Uiua!
xy ← ⍘⍉⊞⊟. ÷÷2∶ -÷2,⇡.200
Rgb ← [∶⍘⊟×.xy ↯△⊢xy0.5]
u ← ↥<0.2∶>0.7.+×2 ×.∶⍘⊟xy
c ← <∶√/+ⁿ2 xy
⍉⊂∶-¬u c1 +0.1 ∺↧Rgb c0.95
Another neat fact about this language is that it’s written in Rust, so it’s potentially quite fast as well. Array stuff in Rust is top of mind for me at the moment - this cool post from earlier in the year covers an implementation of some APL-like array processing in Rust which I’m keen to dig deeper into (there’s a not-too-old repo of things already built). I clearly need to re-read my own posts, because I actually linked to that cool post above in my first APL-related post, but because I had searched for “rank polymorphism” and it fit the bill.
The fact that R has a lot of these array-compatible functions out-of-the-box is terribly underpromoted and undercelebrated. Bringing this back around to R, can I use the array method there? I can certainly build a matrix of 50 letters quite concisely, though the fact that R doesn’t concatenate characters so easily still hurts
m <- matrix(sample(letters, 50, replace = TRUE), 5, 10)
apply(m, 1, \(x) paste0(x, collapse = ""))## [1] "wzyfpoyegm" "xjehbspfql" "vjpvimtwkm" "uzkwmgcmix" "suakdpagvl"I’m hoping to play a bit more with Uiua, and I was genuinely impressed that I managed to solve this at all, but I’m still just beginning my journey in APL and there’s no shortage of things to learn there. In fact, despite having no tryapl.org, I do have the Ride editor locally. A bit of searching for clues later, and I have something!
In (Dyalog) APL you can create the uppercase alphabet with just
⎕AABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZsimilar to LETTERS. Lowercase letters can be generated with
819⌶⎕Aabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzor (possibly implementation-specific)
⎕c⎕aabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzSelecting random elements from this involves roll with
the syntax
?5 10⍴2618 16 7 8 22 25 15 17 24 19
18 23 24 9 25 17 4 2 25 24
10 13 6 11 10 17 21 9 15 20
25 8 3 12 4 2 21 3 1 18
2 5 17 19 25 3 3 21 9 4which produces random values between 1 and the right argument (in this case, a
5x10 reshape of the value 26 repeated over and over). That’s exactly what we need
as indices to select letters. Putting these together
⎕c⎕a[?5 10⍴26]axpyohnotq
hsrottizwk
dgecrgxbcu
qvvxszptpq
wmaktfuvwfEven better - if we store the letters like R does, and define a functional
version which takes a left argument (⍺; the shape of the
array), a right argument (⍵; the letters to sample from), and automatically
calculates the length as ≢⍵, then the entire solution is
letters←⎕c⎕a
randstrings←{⍵[?⍺⍴≢⍵]}
5 10 randstrings lettersnpentutsdo
jttcnqeuqm
imgrtupyfx
eliiqnishu
jonkovlmcnOkay, that’s concise! And, provided you know what ?, ⍴, and ≢ do, it’s
fairly readable (in my opinion, at least).
Can you make a better/shorter/more interesting solution to the random strings problem? Or can improve the Uiua solution? I can be found on Mastodon or use the comments below.
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