In “Creating a Cheap Protocol-Oriented Copy of SequenceType (with a Twist!)” I created my own indexedEnumerate() to return a special kind of enumeration: instead of a tuple of (Int, Element), I wanted to have a tuple of (Index, Element), where Index was a UInt starting at 1. A custom CollectionType can have a different type of index than Int, so I was quite disappointed that the default enumerate() simply returns a sequence with a counter for the elements at first.

Thinking about the meaning of “to enumerate” a bit more, I understand why that is so. Still I need something different that an enumerated sequence.

Now Rob Napier kindly got in touch via email and told me about some cons of my approach I wasn’t quite aware of. Thanks for that!

On top of that, he showed me a version which was only 1 line of lazily evaluated code that could replace my IndexedSequence type:

let indexedValues = zip(collection.indices, collection)

A CollectionType exposes a property called indices which is a range over (startIndex...endIndex). Zipping that range with the collection itself produces a sequence of tuples of type (Index, Element). Just what I needed. 1 line of code. This was so concise that I now have found a couple more places where zipping did the job better than my naive approach.

Thanks a ton, Rob.