[Haskell-cafe] Re: defining last using foldr

Chaddaï Fouché chaddai.fouche at gmail.com
Thu Aug 16 06:13:54 EDT 2007


16 Aug 2007 10:11:24 +0100, Jon Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk>:
>
snip my quote
>
> I certainly wouldn't count such a thing as a valid
> solution. It's always amazed me that C uses as standard a
> mechanism of ending strings that is so obviously an
> error-prone hack.

I'm completely with you on that ! Which is why I don't like the
suggestion of doing it only for Char...

> > Well, it isn't "impossible" but quite hard (and not even standard H98
> > if I'm not mistaken)
>
> If it is possible, I'm very sad that we've allowed things to
> get into the language that make that kind of reasoning
> faulty.

I spoke too fast on this one, it _is_ impossible (I think ?), but you
can use the same trick as for Char to get a polymorphic function,
arguably a little bit more useful than the Char one, since if you have
a undefined as the last element of your list, there's a good chance
anyway that your program is already in a bad state. Still it's an ugly
hack altogether...
Your suggestion is of course the right answer if there is an
obligation to use a foldr and not just any fold.

-- 
Jedaï


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