[Haskell-cafe] Very crazy

[Andrew Coppin]

Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
>
> A nice auxiliary would help:
>
> showEqn :: Int -> [Double] -> String
> showEqn i vs = ...
>     where
>           (add,ans) = (init vs, last vs)
>
> Then you can half the complexity. There are probably a few useful
> functions that aren't in the standard libraries (consperse, joinWith
> etc) that you could make use of.
>   

OK, I'll give that a go...

(Actually, at present it's an "augmented matrix", represented as 
[[Double]]. I'm thinking by making it a matrix and seperate vector, I 
could reduce the runtime quite significantly by making it much faster to 
get hold of the RHS.)

BTW, one *extremely* common function that I've never seen mentioned 
anywhere is this one:

  map2 :: (a -> b) -> [[a]] -> [[b]]
  map2 f = map (map f)

I cannot understand why this isn't already in the standard libraries...

> You seem to be doing take 8 on the double - what if the double prints
> out more information than this as the result of show?
> 1000000000000000000 could end up a bit smaller.
>   

The contents of the matrix are random numbers between 0 and 100. The 
problems happen if one of the numbers turns out to be something like 
"3.5847368473587e-27" or something. Then it will look many thousands of 
times BIGGER! ;-)

Still, since Haskell seems to be devoid of any more advanced way of 
formatting numbers beyond low-level character jiggling...