In the introduction to the Orc language, we were introduced to lists: how to construct them, and how to match them against patterns. While it is certainly feasible to write a specific function with an appropriate pattern match every time we want to access a list, it is helpful to have a handful of common operations on lists and reuse them.

One of the most common uses for a list is to send each of its elements through a sequential combinator. Since the list itself is a single value, we want to walk through the list and publish each one of its elements in parallel as a value. The library function each does exactly that.

Suppose we want to send the message invite to each email address in the list inviteList:

each(inviteList) >address> Email(address, invite)

Orc also adopts many of the list idioms of functional programming. The Orc library contains definitions for most of the standard list functions, such as map and fold. Many of the list functions internally take advantage of concurrency to make use of any available parallelism; for example, the map function dispatches all of the mapped calls concurrently, and assembles the result list once they all return using a fork-join.