Identifying last loop when using for each

Question

I want to do something different with the last loop iteration when performing \'foreach\' on an object. I\'m using Ruby but the same goes for C#, Java etc.

Answer 1

You should use foreach only if you handle each one same. Use index based interation instead. Else you must add a different structure around the items, which you can use to differentiate the normal from last one in the foreach call (look at good Papers about the map reduced from google for the background: http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html, map == foreach, reduced == e.g. sum or filter).

Map has no knowledge about the structure (esp. which position a item is), it only transforms one item by item (no knowledge from one item can be used to transform an other!), but reduce can use a memory to for example count the position and handle the last item.

A common trick is to reverse the list and handle the first (which has now a known index = 0), and later apply reverse again. (Which is elegant but not fast ;) )