I'm practicing Dart and keep running into the term 'Iterable.' I found a line in the documentation that says, 'Common collections like Set and List are Iterable by default.' This has me confused. If I already have a List, why should I care about what an 'Iterable' is?
2 Answers
An iterable is any collection you can loop over. While a list is one type of iterable, other structures like sets or dictionaries are also iterables. So, when the documentation says lists are iterable, it just means they can be used in a loop just like any other iteration collection. It's worth understanding the difference since not all iterables are lists, and knowing this can help you work with different data types more effectively.
When it comes to Dart, Iterable is more of a general concept. Think of it as something from which you can retrieve one item at a time. This can be quite handy, especially for efficiency. Instead of creating a whole new list to filter or manipulate data, you can leverage the Iterable methods to work directly with your collection.
A List is specifically an array-like structure with a fixed size, and it's fully populated in memory. Interestingly, both Lists and Sets are considered Iterables, but Iterables are more versatile. You can use methods like takeWhile or firstWhere, which are lazy-evaluated, meaning they only act when required so you can save on resources.
When you're using a for...in loop, you're working directly with an iterator, not needing to specify how many items to go through, which makes your code cleaner, especially if you're only interested in part of the data.
That makes a lot of sense! Thanks for breaking it down!