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I am trying to understand this piece of code which returns the all possible combinations of [a] passed to it:
-- Infinite list of all combinations for a given value domain
allCombinations :: [a] -> [[a]]
allCombinations [] = [[]]
allCombinations values = [] : concatMap (\w -> map (:w) values)
(allCombinations values)
Here i tried this sample input:
ghci> take 7 (allCombinations [True,False])
[[],[True],[False],[True,True],[False,True],[True,False],[False,False]]
Here it doesn't seems understandable to me which is that how the recursion will eventually stops and will return [ [ ] ], because allCombinations function certainly doesn't have any pointer which moves through the list, on each call and when it meets the base case [ ] it returns [ [ ] ]. According to me It will call allCombinations function infinite and will never stop on its own. Or may be i am missing something?
On the other hand, take only returns the first 7 elements from the final list after all calculation is carried out by going back after completing recursive calls. So actually how recursion met the base case here?
Secondly what is the purpose of concatMap here, here we could also use Map function here just to apply function to the list and inside function we could arrange the list? What is actually concatMap doing here. From definition it concatMap tells us it first map the function then concatenate the lists where as i see we are already doing that inside the function here?
Any valuable input would be appreciated?
Short answer: it will never meet the base case.
However, it does not need to. The base case is most often needed to stop a recursion, however here you want to return an infinite list, so no need to stop it.
On the other hand, this function would break if you try to take more than 1 element of allCombination [] -- have a look at #robin's answer to understand better why. That is the only reason you see a base case here.
The way the main function works is that it starts with an empty list, and then append at the beginning each element in the argument list. (:w) does that recursively. However, this lambda alone would return an infinitely nested list. I.e: [],[[True],[False]],[[[True,True],[True,False] etc. Concatmap removes the outer list at each step, and as it is called recursively this only returns one list of lists at the end. This can be a complicated concept to grasp so look for other example of the use of concatMap and try to understand how they work and why map alone wouldn't be enough.
This obviously only works because of Haskell lazy evaluation. Similarly, you know in a foldr you need to pass it the base case, however when your function is supposed to only take infinite lists, you can have undefined as the base case to make it more clear that finite lists should not be used. For example, foldr f undefined could be used instead of foldr f []
#Lorenzo has already explained the key point - that the recursion in fact never ends, and therefore this generates an infinite list, which you can still take any finite number of elements from because of Haskell's laziness. But I think it will be helpful to give a bit more detail about this particular function and how it works.
Firstly, the [] : at the start of the definition tells you that the first element will always be []. That of course is the one and only way to make a 0-element list from elements of values. The rest of the list is concatMap (\w -> map (:w) values) (allCombinations values).
concatMap f is as you observe simply the composition concat . (map f): it applies the given function to every element of the list, and concatenates the results together. Here the function (\w -> map (:w) values) takes a list, and produces the list of lists given by prepending each element of values to that list. For example, if values == [1,2], then:
(\w -> map (:w) values) [1,2] == [[1,1,2], [2,1,2]]
if we map that function over a list of lists, such as
[[], [1], [2]]
then we get (still with values as [1,2]):
[[[1], [2]], [[1,1], [2,1]], [[1,2], [2,2]]]
That is of course a list of lists of lists - but then the concat part of concatMap comes to our rescue, flattening the outermost layer, and resulting in a list of lists as follows:
[[1], [2], [1,1], [2,1], [1,2], [2,2]]
One thing that I hope you might have noticed about this is that the list of lists I started with was not arbitrary. [[], [1], [2]] is the list of all combinations of size 0 or 1 from the starting list [1,2]. This is in fact the first three elements of allCombinations [1,2].
Recall that all we know "for sure" when looking at the definition is that the first element of this list will be []. And the rest of the list is concatMap (\w -> map (:w) [1,2]) (allCombinations [1,2]). The next step is to expand the recursive part of this as [] : concatMap (\w -> map (:w) [1,2]) (allCombinations [1,2]). The outer concatMap
then can see that the head of the list it's mapping over is [] - producing a list starting [1], [2] and continuing with the results of appending 1 and then 2 to the other elements - whatever they are. But we've just seen that the next 2 elements are in fact [1] and [2]. We end up with
allCombinations [1,2] == [] : [1] : [2] : concatMap (\w -> map (:w) values) [1,2] (tail (allCombinations [1,2]))
(tail isn't strictly called in the evaluation process, it's done by pattern-matching instead - I'm trying to explain more by words than explicit plodding through equalities).
And looking at that we know the tail is [1] : [2] : concatMap .... The key point is that, at each stage of the process, we know for sure what the first few elements of the list are - and they happen to be all 0-element lists with values taken from values, followed by all 1-element lists with these values, then all 2-element lists, and so on. Once you've got started, the process must continue, because the function passed to concatMap ensures that we just get the lists obtained from taking every list generated so far, and appending each element of values to the front of them.
If you're still confused by this, look up how to compute the Fibonacci numbers in Haskell. The classic way to get an infinite list of all Fibonacci numbers is:
fib = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fib (tail fib)
This is a bit easier to understand that the allCombinations example, but relies on essentially the same thing - defining a list purely in terms of itself, but using lazy evaluation to progressively generate as much of the list as you want, according to a simple rule.
It is not a base case but a special case, and this is not recursion but corecursion,(*) which never stops.
Maybe the following re-formulation will be easier to follow:
allCombs :: [t] -> [[t]]
-- [1,2] -> [[]] ++ [1:[],2:[]] ++ [1:[1],2:[1],1:[2],2:[2]] ++ ...
allCombs vals = concat . iterate (cons vals) $ [[]]
where
cons :: [t] -> [[t]] -> [[t]]
cons vals combs = concat [ [v : comb | v <- vals]
| comb <- combs ]
-- iterate :: (a -> a ) -> a -> [a]
-- cons vals :: [[t]] -> [[t]]
-- iterate (cons vals) :: [[t]] -> [[[t]]]
-- concat :: [[ a ]] -> [ a ]
-- concat . iterate (cons vals) :: [[t]]
Looks different, does the same thing. Not just produces the same results, but actually is doing the same thing to produce them.(*) The concat is the same concat, you just need to tilt your head a little to see it.
This also shows why the concat is needed here. Each step = cons vals is producing a new batch of combinations, with length increasing by 1 on each step application, and concat glues them all together into one list of results.
The length of each batch is the previous batch length multiplied by n where n is the length of vals. This also shows the need to special case the vals == [] case i.e. the n == 0 case: 0*x == 0 and so the length of each new batch is 0 and so an attempt to get one more value from the results would never produce a result, i.e. enter an infinite loop. The function is said to become non-productive, at that point.
Incidentally, cons is almost the same as
== concat [ [v : comb | comb <- combs]
| v <- vals ]
== liftA2 (:) vals combs
liftA2 :: Applicative f => (a -> b -> r) -> f a -> f b -> f r
So if the internal order of each step results is unimportant to you (but see an important caveat at the post bottom) this can just be coded as
allCombsA :: [t] -> [[t]]
-- [1,2] -> [[]] ++ [1:[],2:[]] ++ [1:[1],1:[2],2:[1],2:[2]] ++ ...
allCombsA [] = [[]]
allCombsA vals = concat . iterate (liftA2 (:) vals) $ [[]]
(*) well actually, this refers to a bit modified version of it,
allCombsRes vals = res
where res = [] : concatMap (\w -> map (: w) vals)
res
-- or:
allCombsRes vals = fix $ ([] :) . concatMap (\w -> map (: w) vals)
-- where
-- fix g = x where x = g x -- in Data.Function
Or in pseudocode:
Produce a sequence of values `res` by
FIRST producing `[]`, AND THEN
from each produced value `w` in `res`,
produce a batch of new values `[v : w | v <- vals]`
and splice them into the output sequence
(by using `concat`)
So the res list is produced corecursively, starting from its starting point, [], producing next elements of it based on previous one(s) -- either in batches, as in iterate-based version, or one-by-one as here, taking the input via a back pointer into the results previously produced (taking its output as its input, as a saying goes -- which is a bit deceptive of course, as we take it at a slower pace than we're producing it, or otherwise the process would stop being productive, as was already mentioned above).
But. Sometimes it can be advantageous to produce the input via recursive calls, creating at run time a sequence of functions, each passing its output up the chain, to its caller. Still, the dataflow is upwards, unlike regular recursion which first goes downward towards the base case.
The advantage just mentioned has to do with memory retention. The corecursive allCombsRes as if keeps a back-pointer into the sequence that it itself is producing, and so the sequence can not be garbage-collected on the fly.
But the chain of the stream-producers implicitly created by your original version at run time means each of them can be garbage-collected on the fly as n = length vals new elements are produced from each downstream element, so the overall process becomes equivalent to just k = ceiling $ logBase n i nested loops each with O(1) space state, to produce the ith element of the sequence.
This is much much better than the O(n) memory requirement of the corecursive/value-recursive allCombsRes which in effect keeps a back pointer into its output at the i/n position. And in practice a logarithmic space requirement is most likely to be seen as a more or less O(1) space requirement.
This advantage only happens with the order of generation as in your version, i.e. as in cons vals, not liftA2 (:) vals which has to go back to the start of its input sequence combs (for each new v in vals) which thus must be preserved, so we can safely say that the formulation in your question is rather ingenious.
And if we're after a pointfree re-formulation -- as pointfree can at times be illuminating -- it is
allCombsY values = _Y $ ([] :) . concatMap (\w -> map (: w) values)
where
_Y g = g (_Y g) -- no-sharing fixpoint combinator
So the code is much easier understood in a fix-using formulation, and then we just switch fix with the semantically equivalent _Y, for efficiency, getting the (equivalent of the) original code from the question.
The above claims about space requirements behavior are easily tested. I haven't done so, yet.
See also:
Why does GHC make fix so confounding?
Sharing vs. non-sharing fixed-point combinator
I am a beginner in Haskell and trying to learn it, so please excuse my obliviousness.
I am currently trying to implement a Telephone book, which is a List of tuples [(Name, Number)] (Both are Strings).
type TelephoneBook = [(String),(String)] (?)
However, I have no clue how I can extend this list by another tuple.
For example: [("Fred", "47/273")] and now I want to add another tuple.
I was trying to understand how the module dictionary works to see how I can extend this List and I stumbled upon "data" and "type".
An idea I had was to create a several types of this TelephonBook:
let a = TelephoneBook ("Fred","42/2321")
but that is just a simple idea... I am kinda lost on how to extend this list by another tuple, taking into account that once something is defined it can't be altered (or can it).
(Please don't give the solution to the Problem but simply an idea on how to start or what I should Research further)
The (:) operator prepends elements to lists. For example:
> ("John", "555-1212") : [("Fred", "42/2321")]
[("John","555-1212"),("Fred","42/2321")]
because you're asking to extend a list:
i have to disappoint you. That's not possible in Haskell. You can construct a new one. Out of one Element and another List.
the list type in Haskell is defined similar to:
-- 1 2 3 4
data [a] = a : [a] | []
-- 1: if you encounter the type [a]
-- 3: it is either
-- 2: an element `e` and a list `l` forming the new list `e:l`
-- 4: or an empty List `[]`
-- so the types of the constructors are:
-- (:) :: a -> [a] -> [a]
-- [] :: [a]
So having a new element and a list you can construct a new one, using (:)!
type Entry = (String, String)
type Book = [Entry]
addEntry :: Entry -> Book -> Book
addEntry e b = e : b -- this works, because book is just a list
-- without type aliases: (this is the same, but maybe slightly less nice to read)
addEntry' :: (String, String) -> [(String, String)] -> [(String, String)]
addEntry' e b = e : b
-- or even simpler:
addEntry'' = (:)
The type keyword in Haskell has to be understood as a type alias, so it's just another name for something, the representation in Haskell is the same.
let rec transpose list = match list with
| [] -> []
| [] :: xss -> transpose xss
| (x::xs) :: xss ->
(x :: List.map List.hd xss) :: transpose (xs :: List.map List.tl xss)
I found this code on this website and it transposes a list list or in my case a matrix from n × m to m × n.The only problem is I have no idea how it works. Can anyone please explain it step by step, line by line.
You should provide the link to the code as well, for context, or look on that question for an explanation.
Either way, I suspect other new OCaml programmers will come to this question looking for an answer.
-- After a quick Google search I believe this was the question you found the code from.
let rec transpose list = match list with
Create a function called transpose, make it recursive (rec) as we will make the function call itself. It will take an input parameter called list, where the type is determined by OCaml's type-system later.
Match the input parameter list with the following cases. That is, when the function finds a pattern matching those cases, it will execute that particular line of code. If code written does not cover all cases, OCaml will notify that not all cases are exhaustive and will cause a match_failure if it encounters cases that it doesn't cover.
First case:
| [] -> []
If we hit an empty list, return an empty list. This will end the recursion as the empty list is appended to the final result and returned. The empty list is a base case, where we meet a list with nothing inside, or it has recursed till there is nothing left. (the transpose of an empty list is ... and empty list)
| [] :: xss -> transpose xss
This is the case where there are still items in the list. Since it is a list of list, each element in the list we pass in is another list. i.e, [[1;2];[3;4]], so this function handles the case where we have [[];[1;2];[5;6]], it will skip the empty inner list, and then call transpose on the other [[1;2];[5;6]], since we don't need to transpose an empty list. Note that xss is the rest of the list (hence list of list), not just the next element only (which is just a list).
| (x::xs) :: xss ->
(x :: List.map List.hd xss) :: transpose (xs :: List.map List.tl xss)
This is the first case that will be matched when we pass in any regular list of list of length > 1, OCaml is able to match and also "unwrap" each element by breaking it down to fit the pattern, so we can immediately compute those elements without using nested match statements. In this case, we split the list of list into the (x::xs) list (first element) and the remaining list of list, xss. We could have also done it as x::xss but x will be a list that we need to break down into individual elements again.
For example, in [[1;2];[3;4]], (x::xs) will be [1;2] and xss will be [[3;4]]
(x :: List.map List.hd xss) will take the first element in the first list, in the given example, x will be 1. And apply that value to the List.hd of every item in xss list, (List.Map applies a function to every value in the list).
This is where it seems a little complicated. How you can look at it is: When you call List.hd [1;2;3] it will return 1 since it's the head. So when we do 3 :: List.map List.hd [[1;2]] it will return int list = [3; 1]. and it we did 3 :: List.map List.hd [[1;2];[4;5]] we get [3;1;4] as we are getting the head of every list inside the larger list, and appending 3 at the front of the resulting list.
If you did List.map List.tl [[1;2];[4;5]] instead your return type would be [2;5] since List.map applies the List.tl function to every list. You can use List.map to apply say a multiplication function (or anything complicated) to each item in the list in a quick and easy way.
The remaining transpose (xs :: List.map List.tl xss) just calls transpose to the remaining items in the list, which is the tail values of xss (all lists), appended with elements in xs. Try this out on paper if you feel you need a more concrete grasp on it.
Is there an operation on lists in library that makes groups of n elements? For example: n=3
groupInto 3 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
If not, how do I do it?
A quick search on Hoogle showed that there is no such function. On the other hand, it was replied that there is one in the split package, called chunksOf.
However, you can do it on your own
group :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
group _ [] = []
group n l
| n > 0 = (take n l) : (group n (drop n l))
| otherwise = error "Negative or zero n"
Of course, some parentheses can be removed, I left there here for understanding what the code does:
The base case is simple: whenever the list is empty, simply return the empty list.
The recursive case tests first if n is positive. If n is 0 or lower we would enter an infinite loop and we don't want that. Then we split the list into two parts using take and drop: take gives back the first n elements while drop returns the other ones. Then, we add the first n elements to the list obtained by applying our function to the other elements in the original list.
This function, among other similar ones, can be found in the popular split package.
> import Data.List.Split
> chunksOf 3 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
You can write one yourself, as Mihai pointed out. But I would use the splitAt function since it doesn't require two passes on the input list like the take-drop combination does:
chunks :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
chunks _ [] = []
chunks n xs =
let (ys, zs) = splitAt n xs
in ys : chunks n zs
This is a common pattern - generating a list from a seed value (which in this case is your input list) by repeated iteration. This pattern is captured in the unfoldr function. We can use it with a slightly modified version of splitAt (thanks Will Ness for the more concise version):
chunks n = takeWhile (not . null) . unfoldr (Just . splitAt n)
That is, using unfoldr we generate chunks of n elements while at the same time we shorten the input list by n elements, and we generate these chunks until we get the empty list -- at this point the initial input is completely consumed.
Of course, as the others have pointed out, you should use the already existing function from the split module. But it's always good to accustom yourself with the list processing functions in the standard Haskell libraries.
This is ofte called "chunk" and is one of the most frequently mentioned list operations that is not in base. The package split provides such an operation though, copy and pasting the haddock documentation:
> chunksOf 3 ['a'..'z']
["abc","def","ghi","jkl","mno","pqr","stu","vwx","yz"]
Additionally, against my wishes, hoogle only searches a small set of libraries (those provided with GHC or perhaps HP), but you can explicitly add packages to the search using +PKG_NAME - hoogle with Int -> [a] -> [[a]] +split gets what you want. Some people use Hayoo for this reason.
I am new to Haskell and I am trying to understand it. Now I'm reading about lists and I have some questions, how to:
Remove duplicate sub-lists from a list?
Count the number of duplicate items in a list?
countItems item = length . filter (item==)
For the first questions I believe there is a standard function called nub
nub
This question isn't very well specified, maybe you mean this:
ndups xs = length xs - length (nub xs)
about "nub" and my first question:
nub [1,2,3,1]
will return [1,2,3]
but i need: "smth" [3,7] [1,3,7,2,4,3,5,3,7] = [1,2,4,3,5].
i know about
(\\) [3,7] [1,3,7,2,4,3,5,3,7]
but it works only for first sublist [3,7]
[1,2,4,3,5,3,7]
Sub-list can have different meaning
[3,7] is a contiguous sub-list of [1,3,7,8], and also a non-contiguous sub-list of [3,1,7]
If you mean contiguous sub-list then you should look into isPrefixOf in Data.List.
With it you can iterate through the list, removing each of the sub-lists like so:
import Data.List
(//) :: (Eq a) => [a] -> [a] -> [a]
(//) rem [] = []
(//) rem list = if (isPrefixOf rem list)
then [your code here]
else [your code here]
How do you want to handle this case:
(//) [3,7] [3,3,3,7,7,7]
when we remove the sub-list in the middle we will create a new sub-list, should this be removed or not?
If they also should be removed then you can instead build your list with the help of a foldr. You can implement a function that gives the result below by specifying a helper function remPrefix and then building the list up from the end, removing sub-lists as they are formed.
*Main> (//) [1,2] [1,2,4,5,1,1,2,2,3,4]
[4,5,3,4]