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Comment by dochne | Hacker News Reader

My main beef with HCL is a hatred for how it implemented for loops.

Absolutely loathsome syntax IMO

It was mentioned pretty deep in another thread, but this is just straight up user hostile

  variable "my_list" { default = ["a", "b"] }
  resource whatever something {
    for_each = var.my_list
  }

  The given "for_each" argument value is unsuitable: the "for_each" argument must be a map, or set of strings, and you have provided a value of type tuple.

This is what you get if you want a declarative syntax. HCL doesn't have any concept of a for loop, and can't have any concept of a for loop— it's a data serialization format. Terraform can be transformed to and from JSON losslessly. The looping feature is implemented in Terraform.

Ansible's with_items: and loop: do the exact same thing with YAML.

Declarative languages can absolutely loop. Otherwise functional languages wouldn't be a thing.

HCL's looping and conditionals are a mess but they're wonderful in comparison to its facilities for defining and calling functions.

The concept of repeated operations executing with respect to some condition is always going to be a bit different in declarative / functional constructs than in imperative ones. A purely functional language is never going to have the equivalent of: for (...) a++;

Good functional languages like Clojure make something like this awkward and painful to do, because it doesn't really make sense in a functional context.

I think you missed the error message; I wasn't whining about for_each syntax masquerading as if it was a property of the resource, I was pointing out the moronic behavior of attempting to iterate over a list of strings and being given the finger

It is claiming the provided thing is not a set of strings it's a tuple

The fix is

    for_each = toset(var.my_list)

but who in their right mind would say "oh, I see you have a list of things, but I only accept unordered things"

It's not about them being ordered it's about them being unique. You're generating a resource for each element and that resource has a unique name. The stackoverflow way to iterate over a list is to use toset() but more often what people want is

    zipmap(range(length(var.my_list)), var.my_list)

where you get {0 => item, 1=>item} and your resources will be named .0, .1, .2. I get the annoyance about the type naming but in HCL lists and tuples are the same thing.

> It's not about them being ordered it's about them being unique

Ok, so which one of ["a", "b"] in my example isn't unique?

And I definitely, unquestionably, never want resources named foo.0 and foo.1 when the input was foo.alpha and foo.beta

I'm confused by your question, lists don't enforce uniqueness—you can do ["a", "a"] and it's perfectly valid. Sets and the key values of hash maps can't have repeating elements. You can for_each over lists that come from a data block so you can't statically know if a list is effectively a set.

If you don't want .0, .1 then you agree with Terraform's design because that's the only way you could for_each over an arbitrary list that might contain duplicate values. Terraform making you turn your lists into sets gets you what you want.

I just tell people to avoid writing loops in Terraform if it could be at all avoided. And if you iterate make sure it’s a keyed dictionary instead of array/list like data structure

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