LFE Friday - queue:cons/2

This week's LFE Friday was translated with permission from the Erlang Thursday series by Steven Proctor. This week's translator: Robert Virding.

Today's LFE Friday digs a little into the queue module, and we cover queue:cons/2 from the Okasaki API.

queue:cons/2 takes a item and a queue, and will return a new queue with the item at the head of the queue.

> (queue:cons 7 (queue:new))
#(() (7))
> (queue:cons 3 (queue:cons 7 (queue:new)))
#((7) (3))
> (queue:cons 'nil (queue:new))
#(() (nil))
> (queue:cons 5 (queue:from_list '(7 9 13 21)))
#((21) (5 7 9 13))

If we try to pass a list in to queue:cons/2, we see that it does want a queue, and will not do an implicit conversion of a list to a queue.

> (queue:cons 5 '(1 2 3 4))                    
exception error: badarg
  in (: queue in_r 5 (1 2 3 4))

As the queue is setup to be a double ended queue, the Okasaki API also provides a counter function queue:snoc/2, that adds an item to the tail of the queue passed in. Note that the argument order is swapped between queue:snoc/2 and queue:cons/2; queue:snoc/2 takes the queue as the first argument, and the item to add at the tail as the second argument.

> (queue:snoc (queue:new) 5)
#((5) ())
> (queue:snoc (queue:from_list '(7)) 5)
#((5) (7))
> (queue:snoc (queue:snoc (queue:new) 7) 5)
#((5) (7))
> (queue:snoc (queue:from_list '(7 9 13 21)) 5)
#((5 21) (7 9 13))

-Proctor, Robert