Powershell notes (for MATLAB/python users)

Posted on March 28, 2022 by admin

Data Type characteristics

	Powershell	MATLAB	Python
Nearly everything is a/an	Object	Matrix (APL-philosophy)	Object (which are dictionaries)
Assignment behavior*	Reassigned reference	Copy-on-write	Reassigned reference
Monads (wrapper for heterogenous data )	Array/Collections	Cells	Lists

* Shallow assignment (transferring reference only) means the LHS does not have its own copy, so modifying the new reference will modify the underlying data on the RHS.

Syntax / Usage

	Powershell	MATLAB	Python
Method chaining	Yes	Might misbehave	Yes
List Comprehension	–	No. Map first then filter	Yes
Named input arguments	Native `f -a 1 -b 22`	Name-Value pairs parsed inside	Native `f(a=13, b=22)`
Implicit NON-NULL return value	Optional	–	–
Binary map operation	–	Native matrix ops `*fun()` does n-ary	Use numpy `list( map(operator.add, L1, L2) )`
Check Type	`$g -is [type]`	`is*()` or `isa()`	`isinstance(val, type)`
Unpacking (flattening) monads in monads	Default Use unary `,` to avoid	No Use `[{:}]` to perform	No Use , list comp, or `list(itertools.chain(ls))`
Conditional/statement block inside container creation	Yes	–	?
View Object Info with Data	`\| Format-List -Property *` or `Format-List -InputObject`	`properties()` `methods()` `get()`
List members (method and properties)’s prototypes	`\| Get-Member`

Powershell specific

The UNCAPTURED output value in the last line of the block is the return value! Unary side effect statements such as $x++ do not have output value. Watch out for statements that looks like it’s going nowhere at the end of the code as these are not nop/bugs, but return value. This has the same stench as fall-throughs.
foreach() follows the last uncaptured output value return rule above doing a 1-to-1 map from the input collection to output collection (you can assign output to foreach() as it’s also seen as a function)
Powershell suck at binary operations between two arrays. Just an elementwise A+B you’d be thinking in terms of loops and worry about dimensions.
You can put if and loop blocks inside collections list construction, like this:

@( 3, if(cond1){...; $v1}  do{...; $v2}while(cond2) )

MATLAB specific

When used with classes and custom matrices/arrays, chaining fields/properties/methods by indices often do not work, when they do, they often give out only the first element instead of the entire array (IIRC, there are operator methods that needs to be coordinated in the classes involved to make sure they chain correctly). In short, just don’t chain unless in very simple, scalar cases. Always output it to a variable a access the leaf.

Range & Indexing

	Powershell	MATLAB	Python
Logical Indexing	–	Yes	No. Use list comprehension/Numpy
Negative (cyclic) Indexing	Yes	–	Yes
‘`end`‘ of array keyword	–	Yes	No. Skip stop in slice instead
Step (skip every n items)	–	Yes	Yes. Both range or slice
Detect descending range	Yes	–	–
Automatic extend array	–	Yes	–
Reading array out of bounds	Do nothing	Error	Error

Negative (cyclic) indexing along with automatic descending range, along with the lack of ‘end’ keyword is a huge pain in the rear when you want to scan from left to right like A[5:end].

Instead, you’ll have to do $A[4..($A.length-1)] because the range 4..-1 inside A[4..-1] is unrolled as 4,3,2,1,0,-1 (thus scanning from right to left and wraps around) without first consulting with the array A like the end keyword in MATLAB does so it can substitute the ends of the range with the array information before it unrolls.

I am willing to bet that this behavior does not have a sound basis other than people thinking negative indices and descending ranges alone are two good ideas without realizing that nearly nobody freaking wants to scan from right to left and wrap around!

I had the same gripes about negative indices in Python not carefully coordinating with other combinations in common use cases which cases unintuitive behavior.

Range indexing syntax

# Powershell
1..10 # No step/skip for range creation
A[1..10]  # No special treatment in array such as figuring out the 'end'

% MATLAB
A[start:(step):stop]

# Python
A[range(start,stop,step)]
# Slicing (it's not range)
A[(start):(stop):(step)] # Can skip everything 
# In Python, A=X merely reassign the label A as the alias for X.
# Modifying the reassigned A through A=X will modify underlying contents of X
# To deep-copy contents without .Clone(), assign the full slice
A[:] = X

Hasthtable / Dictionaries

% MATLAB: Use dynamic fields in struct or containers.Map()
# Python: dictionaries such as {a:1, b='x'}
# Powershell: @{a=1, b='x'}

Structs

Powershell does not have direct struct or dynamic field name struct. Instead if your object is uniform (you expect the fields not to change much), use [PSCustomObject]@{}. You can also just use simple hashtable @{}, but for some reason it doesn’t work the way I expected when put into arrays when I try to reference it by array index.

Array rules surprises

Array comparisons are filtering operation (not boolean array output like MATLAB). (0..9) -ge 5 gives 5 to 9, not a list of False … False, True … True. To get a boolean array, use this shortcut:

(0..9) | % {$_ -ge 5}

Map-filter combo syntax is | ? instead of Map syntax | %

Monad (Cells in MATLAB) are unpacked and stacked by default (in MATLAB, I had to write a lot of routines to unpack and stack cells of cells). To keep cells packed (in MATLAB lingo, it’s like ‘UniformOutput’, false in cellfun), add a comma unary operator in front of the operation that are expected to be unpacked like this:

.$_.Split('_')

Set Operations

This is one of the WTF moments of Powershell as a programming language. Convenient set operations is essential for most of the routine boring stuff that involves relational data. A lot of Powershell’s intended audience works in database like environment (like IT managers dealing with Active Directory), they have Group-Object for typical data analysis tasks, yet they make life miserable just to do basic set operations like intersection and differencing!

Powershell has a Compare-Object, but this is as unnatural and annoying to use as users are effectively rebuilding all 4 basic set-ops (intersection, union, set-diff, xor) based on any two! Not to mention you have to sift through table to get to the piece you wanted!

Basically Compare-Object out of the box

is a set-diff showing both directions (A\B and also B\A) at the same time. If you throw away the direction info, it’s xor.
if you want intersection, you’ll need to add -IncludeEqual -ExcludeDifferent
(WTF!) If you just specify -ExcludeDifferent, by definition there’s no output because by default Compare-Object shows you ONLY the two set-diffs and you are telling it to not show any diffs!
Union is specifying -IncludeEqual only. But it’d rather stack both then do a | Sort-Object - Unique

Some people might suggest doing | ? {$_ -eq $B} for intersection (or is-member). This is generally a bad idea if you have a lot of data because it’s in the O(n*n) runtime algorithm (loop-within-loop) while any properly done intersection algorithm will just sort then scan the adjacent item to check for duplicates, which gives O(n log(n)) time (typical sorting algorithm takes up most of the time).

If you noticed, it’s set operations within the outputs of Compare-Objects with the Venn diagram of -IncludeEqual -ExcludeDifferent switches! It’s doable, but totally unnecessary mindfuck that should not be repeated frequently.

In MATLAB land, I made my own overloading operators that do set operation over cellstr(), categorical and tabular objects (I went into their code and added the features and talked to TMW so they added the features later), sometimes getting into their sort and indexing logic as necessary. This shows how badly do I need set operations to come naturally.

One might not deal with it too much in low level languages like C++ (STL set doesn’t get used as much compared to other containers), but for a language made to get a lot of common things done (i.e. the language designer kind of reads the users mind), I’m surprised that the Powershell team overlooked the set operations!

Sets are very powerful abstractions that should not be made less descriptive (hard to read) by dancing around it with equivalent operations with some programming gymnastics! If these basic stuff are not built in, we are going to see a lot of people taking ugly shortcuts to avoid coding up these bread and butter functions and put it in libraries (or downloading 3rd-party libraries)!

Powershell surprises

Typical symbolic comparison operators do not work because ‘>’ can be misinterpreted as redirection in command prompts. Use switches like -gt (greater than) instead.
Redirection’s default text output uses UTF16-LE encoding (2 bytes per character). Programs assuming ASCII (1 byte per character) might not behave as intended (e.g. if you use copy command merge an ASCII/UTF8 file with UTF16-LE, you might end up with spaces in the sections that are formatted with UTF16-LE)
Cannot extract string matches from regex without executing a -match which returns boolean unless we use the the $matches$ spilled into variable space. Consider [regex]::Match($Text, $Pattern).Groups[1].Value
Methods are called with parenthesis yet functions are not called with parenthesis, just like cmd-lets! Trying to call a function with multiple input arguments with parenthesis like f(3,5) will be interpreted as calling f with ONE ARGUMENT containing an ARRAY of 3 and 5!
Write-Host takes everything after it literally (white spaces included, almost like echo command), with the exception of plugging in $variables! If you want anything interpreted, such as concatenation, you need to put the bracket around the whole statement!

Libraries and Modules

Reload module using Import-Module $moduleName -Force

GUI Paradigms (1): Redux (Flutter/React) translated to MATLAB

Posted on November 22, 2021 by admin

For GUI development, we often start with controls (or widgets) that user interact with and it’ll emit/run the callback function we registered for the event when the event happens.

Most of the time we just want to read the state/properties of certain controls, process them, and update other controls to show the result. Model-View-Controller (MVC) puts strict boundaries between interaction, data processing and display.

The most common schematic for MVC is a circle showing the cycle of Controller->Model->View, but in practice, it’s the controller that’s the brains. The view can simultaneously accept user interactions, such as a editable text box or a list. The model usually don’t directly update the view directly on its own like the idealized diagram.

MVC with User Action — From https://www.educative.io/blog/mvc-tutorial

With MVC, basically we are concentrating the control’s callbacks to the controller object instead of just letting each control’s callback interact with the data store (model) and view in an unstructured way.

When learning Flutter, I was exposed to the Redux pattern (which came from React). Because the tutorials was designed around the language features of Dart, the documentation kind of obscured the essence of the idea (why do we want to do this) as it dwelt on the framework (structure can be refactored into a package). The docs talked a lot about boundaries but wasn’t clearly why they have to be meticulously observed, which I’ll get to later.

The core inspiration in Redux/BLoC is taking advantage of the concept of ‘listening to a data object for changes’ (instead of UI controls/widget events)!

Instead of having the UI control’s callback directly change other UI control’s state (e.g. for display), we design a state vector/dictionary/struct/class that holds contents (state variables) that we care. It doesn’t have to map 1-1 to input events or 1-1 to output display controls.

When an user interaction (input) event emitted a callback, the control’s callback do whatever it needs to produce the value(s) for the relevant state variable(s) and change the state vector. The changed state vector will trigger the listener that scans for what needs to be updated to reflect the new state and change the states of the appropriate view UI controls.

This way the input UI controls’ callbacks do not have to micromanage what output UI controls to update, so it can focus on the business logic that generates the content pool that will be picked up by the view UI controls to display the results. In Redux, you are free to design your state variables to match more closely to the input data from UI controls or output/view controls’ state. I personally prefer a state vector design that is closer to the output view than input controls.

The intuition above is not the complete/exact Redux, especially with Dart/Flutter/React. We also have to to keep the state in ONE place and make the order of state changes (thus behavior) predictable!

Actions and reducers are separate. Every input control fires a event (action signal) and we’ll wait until the reducers (registered to the actions) to pick it up during dispatch() instead of jumping on it. This way there’s only ONE place that can change states. Leave all the side effects in the control callback where you generate the action. No side effects (like changing other controls) allowed in reducers!
Reducers do not update the state in place (it’s read only). Always generate a new state vector to replace the old one (for performance, we’ll replace the state vector if we verified the contents actually changed). This will make timing predictable (you are stepping through state changes one by one)

In Javascript, there isn’t really a listener actively listening state variable changes. Dispatch (which will be called every time the user interacts using control) just runs through all the listeners registered at the very end after it has dispatched all the reducers. In MATLAB, you can optionally set the state vector to be Observable and attach the change listener callback instead of explicitly calling it within dispatch.

https://gist.github.com/gaearon/ffd88b0e4f00b22c3159

Here is an example of a MATLAB class that captures the spirit of Redux. I added a 2 second delay to emulate long operations and used enableDisableFig() to avoid dealing with queuing user interactions while it’s going through a long operation.

classdef ReduxStoreDemo < handle

    % Should be made private later
    properties (SetAccess = private, SetObservable)
        state % {count}
    end
        
    methods (Static)
        % Made static so reducer cannot call dispatch and indirectly do
        % side effect or create loops
        function state = reducer(state, action)        
            % Can use str2fun(action) here or use a function map
            switch action
                case 'increment'
                    fprintf('Wait 2 secs before incrementing\n');
                    pause(2)
                    state.count = state.count + 1;
                    fprintf('Incremented\n');
            end                
        end        
    end
    
    % We keep all the side-effect generating operations (such as
    % temporarily changing states in the GUI) in dispatch() so
    % there's only ONE PLACE where state can change
    methods
        function dispatch(obj, action, src, evt)
            % Disable all figures during an interaction
            figures = findobj(groot, 'type', 'figure');
            old_fig_states = arrayfun(@(f) enableDisableFig(f, 'off'), figures);      
            src.String = 'Wait ...';
            
                new_state = ReduxStoreDemo.reducer(obj.state, action);
                
                % Don't waste cycles updating nops 
                if( ~isequal(new_state, obj.state) )
                    % MATLAB already have listeners attached.
                    % So no need to scan listeners like React Redux            
                    obj.state = new_state;
                end                
                
            % Re-enable figure obj.controls after it's done
            arrayfun(@(f, os) enableDisableFig(f, os), figures, old_fig_states);                        
            src.String = 'Increment';
        end
    end
    
    methods
        function obj = ReduxStoreDemo()
            figure();            
            obj.state.count = 0;                        
            
            h_1x  = uicontrol('style', 'text', 'String', '1x Box', ...
                              'Units', 'Normalized', ...
                              'Position', [0.1 0.3, 0.2, 0.1], ...
                              'HorizontalAlignment', 'left');                          
            addlistener(obj, 'state', ...
                        'PostSet', @(varargin) obj.update_count_1x( h_1x , varargin{:})); 
                        
            uicontrol('style', 'pushbutton', 'String', 'Increment', ...
                      'Units', 'Normalized', ...
                      'Position', [0.1 0.1, 0.15, 0.1], ...
                      'Callback', @(varargin) obj.dispatch('increment', varargin{:}));                             
            
            % Force trigger the listeners to reflect the initial state
            obj.state = obj.state;
        end
    end
    
    %% These are 'renders' registered when the uiobj.controls are created
    % Should stick to reading off the state. Do not call dispatch here
    % (just leave it for the next action to pick up the consequentials)
    methods
        % The (src, event) is useless for listeners because it's not the 
        % uicontrol handle but the state property's metainfo (access modifiers, etc)
        function update_count_1x(obj, hObj, varargin)            
            hObj.String = num2str(obj.state.count);
        end        
    end
    
end

Reading Lambda Calculus

Posted on October 28, 2021 by admin

Complex expressions in lambda calculus notation here is hard to parse in the head correctly until the day I started using Dart Language and noticed the connection between => lambda notation and C-style function layout. Here’s what I learned:

The expressions are right-associative because the right-most expression is the deepest nested function
Function application (feeding values to the arguments) always starts from left-to-right because you can only gain entry to a nest of functions starting from the outermost level, peeling it layer by later like an onion. So if applying arg to statement is denoted by (statement arg), the order of input would be (((statement arg1) arg2) arg3)
Names showing up on the parameter list of the nearest layer sticks to it (local to the function) and excludes everybody else (variable shadowing): this means the same name have absolutely no bearing as a free variable or being a free variable anywhere, so you can (and should) replace it with a unique name.

Here’s the calculus syntax in the book:

This example is the function application used above

Here’s where reusing the variable $x$ in multiple places to mean different things gets confusing as hell, and the author (as well as the nomenclature) do not emphasize the equivalence to variable shadowing rules: