Ray Lee on Nostr: nprofile1q…r59k6 Sometimes this operation is called flatten, where an argument with ...

nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqc9m22hkc5h6zgrwkz48crhcpw6vch2rf6j97746ugl3neys86jeqcr59k6 (nprofile…59k6) Sometimes this operation is called flatten, where an argument with some composite structure is linearized into an array which can be included inline. A sibling operator is graft, where the structure of the argument is preserved when included in its parent.

These pop up in a lot of languages as native operations, or hand-written functions if missing. The language Go has a limited form of this spelled `...` for expanding an array-like object when calling a variadic function, or when appending items. Javascript has a reverse version of this operator termed destructuring, where an array-like thing is broken out into individual variables.

In my experience this mapping -- or impedence matching -- of structures to other forms happens a lot in code. I suspect there's a uniform description of this in the the PLT world, but I'm afraid I have a gap around those topics.