[Haskell-cafe] Function composition confusion

[Anuj Seth]

Thanks, that clears it up
I was thinking that the output of (splitAt blockSize) would get piped to (splitAt blockSize . snd).
Did not realize it goes to the whole iterate part.

-----Original Message-----
From: Henning Thielemann [mailto:lemming at henning-thielemann.de]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 4:37 PM
To: Anuj Seth
Cc: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Function composition confusion



On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Anuj Seth wrote:

> Excuse the newbie'ness of my question.
> Saw an example in Two Dozen Questions by Rexx Page.
>
> blocks blockSize =
>    takeWhile ( not . null ) . map fst .
>              iterate (splitAt blockSize . snd) . splitAt blockSize
>
> What is the meaning of the . operators outside the parentheses ?

The same as inside. :-)
  (splitAt blockSize) transforms a list to a pair of lists. So imagine a
list input at the right of (splitAt blockSize) and a pair output at the
left. This pair is piped into the 'iterate' part which transforms a list
of pairs into a list of pairs of lists. This in turn is piped to (map fst)
and so on.

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