Nested for-loops, there has to be a better way to do this

Yves S. Garret yoursurrogategod@REDACTED
Wed Jul 29 04:55:50 CEST 2009


I was playing around with the idea of implementing a nested for-loop
like construct (I will concede, they are evil, but at rare times,
necessary.)  In non-functional programming languages, they are trivial
to do.  However, this has proved to be one of those simple things that
are a pain in the neck for me.  The idea was to be able to pass in a
list [5, 5, 10] (for example) and go through it all like 3 dimensional
array.  The below illustration is far from elegant (it's almost 23:00
where I live and need to go to work tomorrow early, so no time to come
up with something more sane :) ), but is there as an inquisitive
exercise.  Now, in my opinion, this implementation sucks (first time
I've ever gave such a problem a shot in Erlang.)

Is there a better way to do this?  Anyone would like to demonstrate
it?

Note: I've tested this code with the lists [2, 4] and [2, 4, 5].

Compiled with:
Erlang (SMP,ASYNC_THREADS,HIPE) (BEAM) emulator version 5.6.5

My code:
======================================
-module(loopWrapper).

-export([runLoop/1]).

runLoop(List) ->
  [FirstVal | RestList] = List,
  NextVal = FirstVal - 1,
  if (length(RestList) > 0) and (FirstVal > 0) ->
    io:format("~B~n~n", [FirstVal]),
    runLoop(RestList),
    io:format("~n~n"),
    runLoop([NextVal | RestList]);
  FirstVal > 0 ->
    io:format("~B", [FirstVal]),
    runLoop([NextVal]);
  true ->
    null
  end.


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