Assign vector components to different variables in Julia - julia

Question

I want to assign the result of an operation to a concatenation of variables in Julia. Something similar to this (although this doesn't work):
a = zeros(5)
b = zeros(5)
a, b .= rand(10)
Is it possible? Thank you.

Answer 1

You are looking for "vector view concatenation". The idea here is to use SubArrays to build an Array that is actually a view into two arrays. Julia does not support this out of the box. The Julia package ChainedVectors.jl was built for this, but it is heavily outdated and only works with Julia <= 0.4.
Not everything is lost. You have two alternatives:
Use CatViews.jl
As pointed out in the comments, CatViews.jl is like ChainedVectors.jl, but works with Julia 0.6 and 0.7:
Pkg.add("CatViews")
using CatViews
a = zeros(2)
b = zeros(2)
CatView(a, b) .= rand(4)
Build your own solution
With a little work, we can get as good as
a = zeros(2)
b = zeros(2)
MyView(a, b) .= rand(4)
Julia allows you to build your own view-concatenation type. The effort required to build it scales proportional to how general you want it to be. Here is a first attempt that works with vectors:
julia> # Create a type for a view into two vectors.
julia> type MyView{T} <: AbstractVector{T}
a::Vector{T}
b:: Vector{T}
end
julia> import Base: size, getindex, setindex!
julia> # Define methods to make MyView behave properly.
julia> size(c::MyView) = size(c.a) .+ size(c.b)
julia> getindex(c::MyView, i::Int) = i <= length(c.a) ? getindex(a, i) : getindex(b, i-length(a))
julia> setindex!(c::MyView, val, i::CartesianIndex) = i[1] <= length(c.a) ? setindex!(c.a, val, i[1]) : setindex!(c.b, val, i[1]-length(a))
julia> setindex!(c::MyView, val, i::Int) = i <= length(c.a) ? setindex!(c.a, val, i) : setindex!(c.b, val, i-length(a))
julia> # Test MyView. Define two arrays and put them
julia> # into a single view.
julia> a = rand(2)
2-element Array{Float64,1}:
0.701867
0.543514
julia> b = rand(2)
2-element Array{Float64,1}:
0.00355893
0.405809
julia> MyView(a, b) .= rand(4)
4-element MyView{Float64}:
0.922896
0.969057
0.586866
0.457117
julia> # Hooray, it worked! As we see below,
julia> # the individual arrays were updated.
julia> a
2-element Array{Float64,1}:
0.922896
0.969057
julia> b
2-element Array{Float64,1}:
0.586866
0.457117

Answer 2

This?
a .= x[1:5]
b .= x[6:end]
You must tell Julia somehow where to split the vector.