How to aggregate over many lists in F# - list

In F# at some point I have many lists (the actual number of them differs for input data) and I want to make an aggregation over all those lists (let say addition for simplification). So what I want to achieve is the same what List.map2 or List.map3 does but for bigger number of lists.
How can I approach it? I was wondering if this is possible to do with List.scan?

You can use List.reduce and do something like this:
> let lists = [[1;2;3]; [1;2;3]; [1;2;3]]
val lists : int list list = (...)
> lists |> List.reduce (List.map2 (+));;
val it : int list = [3; 6; 9]
What does this do?
List.reduce takes a list of values (here the value is int list) and it aggregates them into a single value using a function that says how to merge two values. So in this case, we need to give it a function int list -> int list -> int list and it will call it on the first and the second list, then on the result and the third list (and so on).
The argument List.map2 (+) is a function of the right type - it takes two lists and performs pairwise sum of the two lists. This is really just a shortcut for writing something like:
lists |> List.reduce (fun list1 list2 ->
List.map2 (fun a b -> a + b) list1 list2)

Related

How to apply a function in an iterable list

so I am new to OCaml and im having some trouble with lists.
What I have is a List of chars as follows:
let letters = [a;b;c;d]
I would like to know how can I iterate the list and apply a fuction that takes as arguments every possible combination of two chars on the list (do_someting char1 char2), for example: a and b (do_something a b), a and c .... d and b, d and c; never repeating the same element (a and a or c and c should not happen).
OCaml is a functional language, so we want to try to break down the procedure into as many functional pieces as we can.
Step 1 is "take a list of things and produce all combinations". We don't care what happens afterward; we just want to know all such combinations. If you want each combination to appear only once (i.e. (a, b) will appear but (b, a) will not, in your example), then a simple recursive definition will suffice.
let rec ordered_pairs xs =
match xs with
| [] -> []
| (x :: xs) -> List.append (List.map (fun y -> (x, y)) xs) (ordered_pairs xs)
If you want the reversed duplicates ((a, b) and (b, a)), then we can add them in at the end.
let swap (x, y) = (y, x)
let all_ordered_pairs xs =
let p = ordered_pairs xs in
List.append p (List.map swap p)
Now we have a list of all of the tuples. What happens next depends on what kind of result you want. In all likelihood, you're looking at something from the built-in List module. If you want to apply the function to each pair for the side effects, List.iter does the trick. If you want to accumulate the results into a new list, List.map will do it. If you want to apply some operation to combine the results (say, each function returns a number and you want the sum of the numbers), then List.map followed by List.fold_left (or the composite List.fold_left_map) will do.
Of course, if you're just starting out, it can be instructive to write these List functions yourself. Every one of them is a simple one- or two- line recursive definition and is very instructive to write on your own.

Sub list of a list in taking the second element

Suppose I have the following list of tuple [("a", "b"); ("c", "d"); ("e", "f"); ("g", "h"); ("i", "j")]. I would like to create a sub list from that list by taking the second element of each tuple of that list. In other words, I want to obtain ["a"; "d"; "f", "h"].
I tried iter (fun (x,y) -> liste#[y]) old_list;; but I got
Error: This expression has type (string * string) list
but an expression was expected of type unit
Do I have to use a recursive function? Is there a workaround?
The type of List.iter is ('a -> unit) -> 'a list -> unit. In other words, it returns unit, which is the way in OCaml to return nothing (or nothing interesting anyway).
Since you want your function to return a result, you can't use List.iter. Instead, you want to transform each element of a list in some way. The function that does this is List.map.
Here's a function that changes a list of ints into a list of bools according to whether each int is odd or even:
let is_even list = List.map (fun x -> x mod 2 = 0) list
It works like this:
# is_even [3;4;5;6;7];;
- : bool list = [false; true; false; true; false]
You want something like this with a different fun expression.
As a side comment, your result isn't what would usually be called a sublist of the original list. A sublist is a new list containing some of the elements of the old list. You could call it a projection more accurately I think.

F# return list of list lengths

I am to use combinators and no for/while loops, recursion or defined library functions from F#'s List module, except constructors :: and []
Ideally I want to implement map
I am trying to write a function called llength that returns the list of the lengths of the sublists. For example llength [[1;2;3];[1;2];[1;2;3]] should return [3;2,3]. I also have function length that returns the length of a list.
let Tuple f = fun a b -> f (a, b)
let length l : int =
List.fold (Tuple (fst >> (+) 1)) 0 l
currently have
let llength l : int list =
List.map (length inner list) list
Not sure how I should try accessing my sublists with my restraints and should I use my other method on each sublist? any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!
Since this is homework, I don't want to just give you a fully coded solution, but here are some hints:
First, since fold is allowed you could implement map via fold. The folding function would take the list accumulated "so far" and prepend the next element transformed with mapping function. The result will come out reversed though (fold traverses forward, but you prepend at every step), so perhaps that wouldn't work for you if you're not allowed List.rev.
Second - the most obvious, fundamental way: naked recursion. Here's the way to think about it: (1) when the argument is an empty list, result should be an empty list; (2) when the argument is a non-empty list, the result should be length of the argument's head prepended to the list of lengths of the argument's tail, which can be calculated recursively. Try to write that down in F#, and there will be your solution.
Since you can use some functions that basically have a loop (fold, filter ...), there might be some "cheated & dirty" ways to implement map. For example, via filter:
let mymap f xs =
let mutable result = []
xs
|> List.filter (fun x ->
result <- f x :: result
true)
|> ignore
result |> List.rev
Note that List.rev is required as explained in the other answer.

Strong union of two lists

I've defined functions:
fun concaten(x,y) =
if (x = [])
then y
else hd(x) :: concaten(tl(x),y);
as well as:
fun existsin(x,L) =
if (L=[])
then false
else if (x = hd(L))
then true
else existsin(x,tl(L));
and am now trying to define a function of type (((list * list) -> list) -> list) that looks vaguely like the following:
fun strongunion(x,y) =
val xy = concaten(x,y);
if xy=[]
then []
if (existsin(hd(xy),tl(xy)) andalso x!= [])
then strongunion(tl(x),y)
else if (existsin(hd(xy),tl(xy)) andalso x = [])
then strongunion(x,tl(y))
else if (x != [])
then hd(xy) :: strongunion(tl(x),y)
else hd(xy) :: strongunion(x,tl(y));
which takes the "strong" union of two lists, i.e. it combats faulty inputs (lists with element duplicates). This code is, of course, syntactically invalid, but the reason I included it was to show what such a function would look like in an imperative language.
The way I started going about doing this was to first concatenate the lists, then remove duplicated elements from that concatenation (well, technically I am adding non-duplicates to an empty list, but these two operations are consequentially equivalent). To do this, I figured I would design the function to take two lists (type list*list), transform them into their concatenation (type list), then do the duplicate removal (type list), which would be of type (((list*list) -> list) -> list).
My issue is that I have no idea how to do this in SML. I'm required to use SML for a class for which I'm a TA, otherwise I wouldn't bother with it, and instead use something like Haskell. If someone can show me how to construct such higher-order functions, I should be able to take care of the rest, but I just haven't come across such constructions in my reading of SML literature.
I'm a bit unsure if strong union means anything other than just union. If you assume that a function union : ''a list * ''a list -> ''a list takes two lists of elements without duplicates as inputs, then you can make it produce the unions without duplicates by conditionally inserting each element from the one list into the other:
(* insert a single element into a list *)
fun insert (x, []) = [x]
| insert (x, xs as (y::ys)) =
if x = y
then xs
else y::insert(x, ys)
(* using manual recursion *)
fun union ([], ys) = ys
| union (x::xs, ys) = union (xs, insert (x, ys))
(* using higher-order list-combinator *)
fun union (xs, ys) = foldl insert ys xs
Trying this:
- val demo = union ([1,2,3,4], [3,4,5,6]);
> val demo = [3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2] : int list
Note, however, that union wouldn't be a higher-order function, since it doesn't take functions as input or return functions. You could use a slightly stretched definition and make it curried, i.e. union : ''a list -> ''a list -> ''a list, and say that it's higher-order when partially applying it to only one list, e.g. like union [1,2,3]. It wouldn't even be fully polymorphic since it accepts only lists of types that can be compared (e.g. you can't take the union of two sets of functions).

Adding two lists together with map

So I'm trying to write some minimal code to put two lists of strings together, and to do this I thought it was best to use the haskell map function.
Essentially I want to be able to do adders ["1","2"] ["3","4"] = ["1","2","3","4"]
So I have a function called adder, which takes a list, then adds a string to that list and returns the new list. Then I have a function called adders which replicates the adder function, but adds a list of strings instead of just one string, however at the moment it produces multiple lists instead of one list.
I thought
adder :: [String] -> String -> [String]
adder y x = y ++ [x]
adders y x = map (adder y) x
would work, but this just gives a list of two lists
[["1","2","3"],[["1","2","4"]]
How is the best way to go about this?
I thought it was best to use the haskell map function
No. map f applies f to every element of your list. But you don't want to change the elements at all, you want to change the list itself. That, however, is out of scope of the things that are possible with map. map cannot add more elements, neither can it remove some.
If you want to concatenate two lists, simply use ++:
adders :: [a] -> [a] -> [a]
adders x y = x ++ y