Check if all elements of list are prime in Raku - mapreduce

Question

my #g = (1,2,3,4);
say reduce {is-prime}, #g; # ==> gives error
say reduce {is-prime *}, #g; #==> gives error
say reduce {is-prime}, (1,2,3,4); # ==> gives error
say so is-prime #g.all; # ==> gives error
How to check if all elements of list are prime in Raku?

Answer 1

The answers above are all helpful, but they fail to explain why your solution does not work. Basically reduce is not going to apply a function (in your case, is-prime) to every member of a list. You want map for that. The error says
Calling is-prime() will never work with signature of the proto ($, *%)
Because reduce expects an infix, thus binary, function, or a function with two arguments; what it does is to apply them to the first pair of elements, then to the result and the third element, and so on. Last statement does not work for a similar reason: you are calling is-prime with a list argument, not a single argument.

Answer 2

You're basically asking: are there any elements in this list which are not prime? I would write that as:
say "not all prime" if #g.first: !*.is-prime;
Please note though, that apparently 1 is not considered prime according to the is-prime function:
say 1.is-prime; # False
so the first would trigger on the 1 in your example, not on the 4.

Answer 3

There are of course may ways to do this. A very explicit way is using a for loop:
for #g -> $g {
if $g.is-prime {
say $g;
}
}
Or with a grep (you could leave the $_ implicit):
#g.grep({ $_.is-prime }).say
Both above are assuming you really want to filter the primes out. Of course you can also really check each number and get a boolean:
#g.map({ .is-prime }).say

Answer 4

There is a big problem with this:
say reduce {is-prime}, #g;
You created a lambda:
{ }
The only thing it does is calls a function:
is-prime
You didn't give the function any arguments though.
Is it just supposed to guess what the arguments should be?
If you meant to pass in is-prime as a reference, you should have used &is-prime rather than {is-prime}.
Of course that still wouldn't have worked.
The other problem is that reduce operates by recursively combining values.
It can't do that if it operates on one argument at a time.
The bare block lambda {}, takes zero or one argument, not two or more.
reduce is often combined with map.
It happens so often that there is a Wikipedia page about MapReduce.
say ( map &is-prime, #g ==> reduce { $^a and $^b } );
# False
say ( map &is-prime, 2,3,5 ==> reduce { $^a and $^b } );
# True
I wrote it that way so that map would be in the line before reduce, but perhaps it would be more clear this way:
say reduce {$^a and $^b}, map &is-prime, 2,3,5;
# True
reduce with an infix operator is so common that there is a shorter way to write it.
say [and] map &is-prime, 2,3,5;
# True
Of course it would be better to just find the first value that isn't prime, and say the inverse.
Since if there is even a single value that isn't prime that would mean they can't all be primes.
You have to be careful though, as you may think something like this would always work:
not #g.first: !*.is-prime;
It does happen to work for the values you gave it, but may not always.
first returns Nil if it can't find the value.
not (2,3,5).first: !*.is-prime;
# not Nil === True
not (2,3,4).first: !*.is-prime;
# not 4 === False
not (2,3,0,4).first: !*.is-prime;
# not 0 === True
That last one returned 0 which when combined with not returns True.
You could fix this with defined.
not defined (2,3,0,4).first: !*.is-prime;
# False
This only works if first wouldn't return an undefined element that happens to be in the list.
(Int,Any).first: Real
# Int
defined (Int,Any).first: Real
# False
You could fix that by asking for the index instead of the value.
You of course still need defined.
(Int,Any).first: :k, Real
# 0
defined (Int,Any).first: :k, Real
# True
The other way to fix it is to just use grep.
not (2,3,0,4).grep: !*.is-prime;
# not (0,4) === False
Since grep always returns a List, you don't have to worry about checking for 0 or undefined elements.
(A List is True if it contains any elements, no matter what the values.)
grep is smart enough to know that if you coerce to Bool that it can stop upon finding the first value.
So it short-circuits the same as if you had used first.
This results in some fairly funky code, with those two negating operators. So it should be put into a function.
sub all-prime ( +#_ ) {
# return False if we find any non-prime
not #_.grep: !*.is-prime
# grep short-circuits in Bool context, so this will stop early
}
This could still fail if you give it something weird
all-prime 2,3,5, Date.today;
# ERROR: No such method 'is-prime' for invocant of type 'Date'
If you care, add some error handling.
sub all-prime ( +#_ ) {
# return Nil if there was an error
CATCH { default { return Nil }}
# return False if we find any non-prime
not #_.grep: !*.is-prime
}
all-prime 2,3,5, Date.today;
# Nil

Answer 5

use the all junction:
say so all #g».is-prime; # False