Custom indexing

SwiftAI
1

My friend Stefano @ste is really enthusiastic about Swift, but he doesn’t love the 0..<5 range syntax - it’s hard to type and not very concise. He prefers Python’s :5 colon indexing. Unfortunately the : character is not allowed for custom operators in Swift, so I wrote this silly snippet for him using | instead:

prefix operator |
prefix func |(n: Int) -> Range<Int> {
    return 0..<n
}

Therefore if you have a Tensor like so:

var t = Tensor<Float>(randomNormal: TensorShape(5, 4))
t

[[ -0.6274641,  -0.5159432, -0.37829402,  0.56560385],
 [-0.70372456, -0.43395498,   0.5455911,  -1.3490856],
 [  2.3749003, -0.68107045,   0.5483691, -0.18535607],
 [  0.6491169,  -0.1704834,  -0.1894283,   0.2739358],
 [ -1.1265595, -0.17301613,  -1.1592884,  0.92231935]]

You can do:

t[|1]
[[ -0.6274641, -0.5159432, -0.37829402, 0.56560385]]

t[|1,|2]
[[-0.6274641, -0.5159432]]

This is just an example with many limitations, but I suppose it could be extended to better support a somewhat more expressive syntax if anyone wants to do so :slight_smile:

4 Likes
2

Thant’s Great! Thank you Pedro :wink:

1 Like
3

You can use partial ranges.

tensor[..<n]
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4

I would say that these pipes characters make the indexation syntax a bit harder to read, especially if you have many of them.

5

It would be nice to get Python’s indexing in Swift, especially allowing for negative indices and strides. Currently you have to write:

for i in stride(from: n - 1, through: 0, by: -1) { ... }

It would be nicer if there was syntactic sugar shorthand for this.

3 Likes