[Haskell-beginners] Mutable grid

[mike h]

Thanks Michael for you help. Very useful.

Mike

> On 19 Dec 2016, at 20:12, Michael Orlitzky <michael at orlitzky.com> wrote:
> 
> On 12/19/2016 01:31 PM, mike h wrote:
>> 
>> There are (several hundred) sequential  operations on a grid 50 x 6
>> - initially all zeroes
>> ...
>> 
>> At this point  my knowledge of Haskell is being pushed (which is good)
>> but I have a feeling that 
>> my approach is not ‘correct’ once it gets beyond the parsing. Should
>> each of the evalRect, evalRotRow and evalRotCol be called with a Screen
>> (i.e. the grid at the root of this question)?
>> Is the state monad a fit for this problem?
>> Should I change my approach or is using vector the way forward?
>> 
> 
> This is just plain difficult to do functionally, don't be discouraged.
> Using mutable vectors is going to speed things up, but it isn't going to
> simplify anything conceptually.
> 
> If I were you, I would start by making everything work slowly-but-safely
> on a tiny grid, accessing (and checking) everything by indices. First,
> write yourself a function that can modify one entry on the screen. Then,
> using that, a function that can modify one row. Then implement the
> matrix "transpose", and you get column operations for free: transpose,
> do the thing for rows, and then transpose back.
> 
> Rather than evaluate the expressions at the same time you parse them, I
> would convert them to functions instead. So the instruction "rect 3x2"
> would get converted into a function that takes a Screen and outputs a
> Screen. If you do that for all of the instructions, then you can just
> compose everything. If "rect 3x2" gives you the function `f1` and "rect
> 5x7" gives you the function `f2`, then `f1 . f2` does one followed by
> the other. Your program will wind up being one long composition of
> functions that you can construct from the list of expressions. You can
> compose an entire list of functions with a fold:
> 
>  ghci> let times n x = n*x
>  ghci> let fs = [ times n | n <- [1..10] ]
>  ghci> foldr (.) id fs 1     -- 10 times 9 times 8 times... times 1
>  3628800
> 
> If you need it to be fast, then you can switch the list of lists to a
> mutable vector of mutable vectors. All you should have to change is the
> function that modifies one entry, since the rest will be implemented in
> terms of that.
> 
> On the other hand, if it's already fast enough, it would be very sexy to
> use something like fixed-vector to ensure that the row/column lengths
> are statically checked =)
> 
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