Assignments

An assignment evaluates an expression, its right-hand side, and stores results in placeholders. This allows reusing the results multiple times without having to recompute them or repeat complicated expressions.

Placeholders

Placeholders are used to provide a name for a fixed value. In line with those semantics, placeholders must be given a value exactly once: They must be given a value directly when they are declared and that value cannot be changed afterward (immutability).

Placeholder ≠ Variable

Placeholders are not the same as variables in other programming languages. They are immutable, meaning that their value cannot be changed later.

The next snippet shows how the singular result of an expression (the loaded Table) can be assigned to a placeholder called titanic:

val titanic = Table.fromCsvFile("titanic.csv");

This assignment to a placeholder has the following syntactic elements:

• The keyword val, which indicates that we want to declare a placeholder.
• The name of the placeholder, here titanic. It can be any combination of lower- and uppercase letters, underscores, and numbers, as long as it does not start with a number.
• An = sign.
• The expression to evaluate (right-hand side).
• A semicolon at the end.

Name convention

Use lowerCamelCase for the name of the placeholder. You may prefix the name of an unused placeholder with an underscore (_) to indicate that it is intentionally unused, e.g. to inspect its value. This disables the "unused" warning.

References to Placeholder

We can access the value of a placeholder in statements that follow its assignment by using the placeholder's name. This is called a reference. Here is a basic example, where we slice the titanic table to get the first five rows. We then store the result of that call in another placeholder called head:

val titanic = Table.fromCsvFile("titanic.csv");
val head = titanic.sliceRows(end = 5);

More information about references can be found in the dedicated document.

Assigning Multiple Placeholders

Some calls return multiple results. In such cases, we can assign each result to a separate placeholder. For example, the splitRows method in the next example splits a table into two tables according to a given ratio. We assign the two results to the placeholders training and validation:

val training, val validation = titanic.splitRows(0.8);

The placeholder declarations are separated by commas. Note, that the keyword val is repeated for each declaration.

There must be at most as many placeholder declarations on the left-hand side as the right-hand side has results. Assignment happens by index, so the first result is assigned to the first placeholder, the second result is assigned to the second one, and so forth. If there are more results than placeholders, any trailing results are implicitly ignored.

Inspecting Placeholder Values in VS Code

Inspecting placeholder values requires a working installation of the Safe-DS Runner. Follow the instructions in the installation guide to install it. Afterward, you can inspect values of various types via so-called code lenses in the editor:

• Tabular data can be inspected using the Explore <placeholder name> code lens. It opens the table in a separate view.
• Images can be inspected using the Show <placeholder name> code lens. It opens the image in an image viewer.
• Primitive data (e.g. Int, Float, String, etc.) can be inspected using the Print <placeholder name> code lens. It shows the value in the output panel.

Efficiency

When you inspect a placeholder, only the part of your pipeline, which is necessary to compute the value of the placeholder, is executed. There is no need to comment out other parts of your pipeline.

Wildcards

In case we want to ignore a result of the right-hand side, we can insert an underscore (called a wildcard). In the next example, we ignore the first result of splitRows:

_, val validation = titanic.splitRows(0.8);

Ignoring all results is equivalent to an expression statement, which should be used instead in such cases.