Find x in list of lists - list

I have a little problem with my homework to school. I have to write code, which will find any x (int or letter) in a list of lists.
I have something like this:
find x xxs = [ [ x | x <- xs, x `elem` xs ] | xs <- xxs ]
Hugs98 accept it without any exception, but it doesn't work.
Input: find 2 [[1,1,1,1],[4,4,4,4],[3,3,3]]
Output: [[1,1,1,1],[4,4,4,4],[3,3,3,3]]

With a little renaming, I think you just wrote this:
find x yss = [ [ y | y <- ys, y `elem` ys ] | ys <- yss ]
I don't think that's what you meant to do. (In your code, you've got two variables named x, one shadowing the other.)
Your question doesn't state what tools you are or aren't allowed to use.
Clearly elem finds stuff in a list. And by "finds", I mean it returns a Bool indicating whether the target item is present or not. But how to handle a list of lists?
A list comprehension always returns a list, so if you were hoping for find to return a Bool, you don't want a list comprehension.
You can use map to apply elem to every list in the list of lists - but now you have a list of Bools. There are two ways to deal with that. One slightly kludgy way is to use elem to see if the list contains True anywhere. But a more sane way is to use the built-in or function, which takes the logical-OR of a list of Bools. (There is also a corresponding and function.)
find x yss = or (map (x `elem`) yss)
There's another way you can do this too; there's a built-in function called any, which applies a function to a list of stuff and returns True if the supplied function ever returns True. So you can do
find x yss = any (x `elem`) yss

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.

How to use if-then-else in a recursive function

I am writing a function that will take a list of list and merge it into sorted pairs of list. For example [[1],[9],[8],[7],[4],[5],[6]] would return [[1,9],[7,8],[4,5],[6]]. This is my first attempt at SML. I keep getting this error: operator and operand don't agree [overload conflict].
fun mergePass[] = []
| mergePass(x::[]) = x::[]
| mergePass(x::y::Z) =
if x<y
then (x # y)::mergePass(Z)
else (y # x)::mergePass(Z);
Edit: If mergePass is called on [[1,9],[7,8],[4,5],[6]] I will need it to return [[1,7,8,9],[4,5,6]].
This merge function takes two sorted lists
fun merge([],y) = y
| merge(x,[]) = x
| merge(a::x,b::y) =
if a < b then a::merge(x,b::y)
else b::merge(a::x,y);
You seem reasonably close. A few hints/remarks:
1) Aesthetically, using nil in one line and [] in others seems odd. Either use all nil or use all []
2) Since the input are lists of lists, in x::y::z, the identifiers x and y would be lists of integers, rather than individual integers. Thus, x<y wouldn't make sense. You can't compare lists of integers using <.
3) Your problem description strongly suggests that the inner-lists are all 1-element lists. Thus you could use the pattern [x]::[y]::z to allow you to compare x and y. In this case, x#y could be replaced by [x,y]
4) If the inner lists are allowed to be of arbitrary size, then your code needs major revision and would probably require a full-fledged sort function to sort the result of concatenating pairs of inner lists. Also, in this case, the single list in the one inner list case should probably be sorted.
5) You have a typo: mergeP isn't mergePass.
On Edit:
If the sublists are each sorted (and the name of the overall function perhaps suggests this) then you need a function called e.g. merge which will take two sorted lists and combine them into a single sorted list. If this is for a class and you have already seen a merge function as an example (perhaps in a discussion of merge-sort) -- just use that. Otherwise you will have to write your own before you write this function. Once you have the merge function, skip the part of comparing x and y and instead have something as simple as:
| mergePass (xs::ys::zss) = (merge xs ys) :: mergePass zss
If the sublists are not merged, then you will need a full-fledged sort in which case you would use something like:
| mergePass (xs::ys::zss) = sort(xs # ys) :: mergePass zss

weaving lists in haskell

I'm trying to create a function to weave two lists together for example
[1,3,5] and [2,4] -> [1,2,3,4,5]
I get the basic principle of what I have to do and check for but I'm running into the problem that the required type
interleave :: ([a],[a]) -> [a]
is giving errors about different number of arguments. This is the version that's given me the least amount of errors so far
interleave ([],[]) = []
interleave (xs,[]) = [xs]
interleave ([],ys) = [ys]
interleave (x:xs) (y:ys) = x : y : interleave xs ys
I've tried messing with the arguments and outputs a few times but I'm new to haskell syntax so I don't really see where I'm going wrong
PART 2: Also I have a testing file to makes sure the functions are correct so if I'm still having trouble after this with that file (as I was getting similar input/output mismatches there which led me to change to what I have now) I'll probably post that code too for help
Unless you have a requirement to take only a single parameter, I think it would make more sense to change all cases to take two parameters:
interleave [] [] = []
interleave xs [] = xs
interleave [] ys = ys
interleave (x:xs) (y:ys) = x : y : interleave xs ys
Note that in the case interleave xs [], you originally returned [xs]. This is a list containing the list named xs. Instead you should return xs directly. Simlarly for the case involving ys.
The problem is that your type signature, and your three cases, are all defining a function of one parameter (of type ([a], [a])), but then your fourth case is trying to define a function of two parameters (the first one being x:xs, the second y:ys).
The fix is to change the fourth case to also be over a single pair parameter:
interleave (x:xs, y:ys) = x : y : interleave (xs, ys)

SML: function with multiple outputs

I´m a newbie in SML and I´d like to update my function so that it has two outputs: a list AND 1 or 0. The function was proposed here: SML: Remove the entry from the List. It returns an updated list without a row that contains ´elem´.
fun removeElem elem myList = filter (fn x => x <> elem) myList
The function should return a new list AND 1, if a raw has been deleted. Otherwise, it should return an old list AND 0.
Any hint or example is highly appreciated. Thanks.
Note that all SML functions take a single input and return a single output. Instead, think of returning a tuple containing the new list and a flag indicating whether any elements were removed. One possibility is to use a couple of functions from the standard basis to test whether elem is in myList and build up a tuple consisting of that and the results from the filter shown in the question. The test might look like:
Option.isSome (List.find (fn x => x = elem) myList)
There are more concise ways to write that, but it shows the idea. Note that it returns a bool instead of an int; this is more precise, so I won't convert to the integers requested in the question.
A drawback of the above is that it requires traversing the list twice. To avoid that, consider the type that the function must return: a tuple of a list without elem and a flag showing whether any elems have been removed. We can then write a function that take a new value and a (valid) tuple, and returns a valid tuple. One possibility:
fun update(x, (acc, flag)) = if x = elem then (acc, true) else (x :: acc, flag)
We can then apply update to each element of myList one-by-one. Since we want the order of the list to stay the same, apart from the removed elements, we should work through myList from right to left, accumulating the results into an initially empty list. The function foldr will do this directly:
foldr update ([], false) myList
However, there is a lot of logic hidden in the foldr higher-order function.
To use this as a learning exercise, I'd suggest using this problem to implement the function in a few ways:
as a recursive function
as a tail-recursive function
using the higher order functions foldl and foldr
Understanding the differences between these versions will shed a lot of light on how SML works. For each version, let the types guide you.
As has been stated in some of your previous questions; Returning 0 or 1 as an indicator for what happened is a really bad design, as you don't get any guarantees from the types, whether or not you will get -42 as the result. Since you are working with a strongly typed language, you might as well use this to your advantage:
The most obvious thing to do instead would be to return a boolean, as that is actually what you are emulating with 0 and 1. In this case you could return the pair (true, modified_list) or (false, original_list).
Since you want to associate some data with the result, there is another -- perhaps, for some, less -- obvious thing to do; Return the result as an option, indication a change in the list as SOME modified_list and indication no change as NONE.
In either case you would have to "remember" whether or not you actually removed any elements from the original list, and thus you can't use the filter function. Instead you would have to do this for yourself using somewhat the same code as you originally posted.
One way would be like this
fun removeElem _ [] = (false, [])
| removeElem elem (x::xs) =
let
val (b, xs') = removeElem elem xs
in
if elem = x then
(true, xs')
else
(b, x::xs')
end
Another way would be to use a accumulator parameter to store the resulting list
fun removeElem elem xs =
let
fun removeElem' [] true res = SOME (rev res)
| removeElem' [] false _ = NONE
| removeElem' (x::xs) b res =
if elem = x then
removeElem' xs true res
else
removeElem' xs b (x::res)
in
removeElem' xs false []
end
Since the solution is being built in the reverse order, we reverse the result just before we return it. This makes sure that we don't have to use the costly append operation when adding elements to the result list: res # [x]

What does :: and ' mean in oCaml?

What doesx :: xs' mean?
I dont have much functional experience but IIRC in F# 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: [];; creates an array of [1,2,3]
so what does the ' do?
let rec sum xs =
match xs with
| [] -> 0
| x :: xs' -> x + sum xs'
I think sepp2k already answered most of the question, but I'd like to add a couple of points that may clarify how F#/OCaml compiler interprets the code and explain some common uses.
Regarding the ' symbol - this is just a part of a name (a valid identifier starts with a letter and then contains one or more letters, numbers or ' symbols). It is usually used if you have a function or value that is very similar to some other, but is in some way new or modified.
In your example, xs is a list that should be summed and the pattern matching decomposes the list and gives you a new list (without the first element) that you need to sum, so it is called xs'
Another frequent use is when declaring a local utility function that implements the functionality and takes an additional parameter (typically, when writing tail-recursive code):
let sum list =
let rec sum' list res =
match list with
| [] -> res
| x::xs -> sum' xs (res + x)
sum' list 0
However, I think there is usually a better name for the function/value, so I try to avoid using ' when writing code (I think it isn't particularly readable and moreover, it doesn't colorize correctly on StackOverflow!)
Regarding the :: symbol - as already mentioned, it is used to create lists from a single element and a list (1::[2;3] creates a list [1;2;3]). It is however worth noting that the symbol can be used in two different ways and it is also interpreted in two different ways by the compiler.
When creating a list, you use it as an operator that constructs a list (just like when you use + to add two numbers). However, when you use it in the match construct, it is used as a pattern, which is a different syntactic category - the pattern is used to decompose the list into an element and the remainder and it succeeds for any non-empty list:
// operator
let x = 0
let xs = [1;2;3]
let list = x::xs
// pattern
match list with
| y::ys -> // ...
The ' is simply part of the variable name. And yes foo :: bar, where foo is an element of type a and bar is a list of type a, means "the list that has foo as its first element, followed by the elements of bar". So the meaning of the match statement is:
If xs is the empty list, the value is 0. If xs is the list containing the item x followed by the items in xs' the value is x + sum xs'. Since x and xs' are fresh variables, this has the effect that for any non empty list, x will be assigned the value of the first element and xs' will be assigned the list containing all other elements.
Like others have said, the ' is a carryover from mathematics where x' would be said as "x prime"
It's idiomatic in ML-family languages to name a variable foo' to indicate that it's somewhat related to another variable foo, especially in recursions like your code sample. Just like in imperative languages you use i, j for loop indices. This naming convention may be a little surprising since ' is typically an illegal symbol for identifiers in C-like languages.
What does x :: xs' mean?
If you have two variables called x and xs' then x :: xs' creates a new list with x prepended onto the front of xs'.
I dont have much functional experience but IIRC in F# 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: [];; creates an array of [1,2,3]
Not quite. It's a list.
so what does the ' do?
It is treated as an alphabetical character, so the following is equivalent:
let rec sum xs =
match xs with
| [] -> 0
| x :: ys -> x + sum ys
Note that :: is technically a type constructor which is why you can use it in both patterns and expressions.