[Haskell-cafe] Weaving fun

[Dan Piponi]

Here's a very different approach. I make no claim to increased
elegance or efficiency, though I find it fairly readable and its made
of reusable parts. (Of course that's how you always finds your own
code!)

import Prelude hiding (head,tail)

-- Some would say this is how head and tail should have been defined.
head (a:_) = Just a
head _ = Nothing
tail (_:a) = Just a
tail _ = Nothing

-- A bit like map but stops when f returns Nothing.
mapWhile f (a:b) = case f a of
    Just x -> x : mapWhile f b
    Nothing -> []
mapWhile f [] = []

weave [] = []
weave a = mapWhile head a ++ weave (mapWhile tail a)


On 4/10/07, Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For my own exercise I'm writing a function 'weave' that "weaves" a
> list of lists together. For example:
>
>   weave [[1,1,1], [2,2,2], [3,3]] ==> [1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2]
>   weave [[1,1,1], [2,2], [3,3,3]] ==> [1,2,3,1,2,3,1]
>
> Note that 'weave' stops when a list is empty. Right now I have:
>
>   weave :: [[a]] -> [a]
>   weave ll = work ll [] []
>       where
>         work ll = foldr f (\rst acc -> work (reverse rst) [] acc) ll
>         f []     g = \_   acc -> reverse acc
>         f (x:xs) g = \rst acc -> g (xs:rst) (x:acc)
>
> However I find this definition hard to read and I'm questioning its
> efficiency especially due to the 'reverse' parts (how do they impact
> performance and can they be removed?)
>
> So I'm wondering if 'weave' can be defined more "elegantly" (better
> readable, shorter, more efficient, etc.)?
>
> happy hacking,
>
> Bas van Dijk
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