[Swift-devel] passing very long lists of files to applications

[Ben Clifford]

a related idea to this when you are using some component program that is 
summarising data and is associative (and maybe other properties) in its 
work is that the associativity could be indicated to Swift, and Swift 
could then make use of that to generate an arbitrary number of app calls.

For example, the numerical operations max or sum fit this, but mean
does not.

max (100,8,1,1,33,8,7,423,46,2,222) = max(   max(100,8,1,1), max(33,8), 
max(7,423,46), max(2,222) )

so its possible to evaluate the max without any individual invocation 
having more than 4 parameters.

This fits in quite nicely with ideas of having Swift stuff be expressed 
more functionally, and have Swift able to make its own decisions about 
exactly how things are run.

I don't think this is going to be something that goes in the language 
soon, but if anyone happens to pursue the functional direction further, 
this is a case that should be kept in mind.

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