[Haskell-cafe] Re: Need some help with an infinite list

[Matthew Brecknell]

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 23:57 +0800, Lee Duhem wrote:
> [...] I have prepared a blog post for how
> I worked out some of these answers, here is the draft of it, I hope it
> can help you too.

Nice post! Certainly, pen-and-paper reasoning like this is a very good
way to develop deeper intuitions.

> 	Answer 1 (by Matthew Brecknell):
> 
> 	concat $ tail $ iterate (map (:) ['a' .. 'z'] <*>) [[]]

I actually said "tail $ concat $ iterate ...", because I think the
initial empty string is logically part of the sequence. Tacking "tail"
on the front then produces the subsequence requested by the OP.

I should have given more credit to Reid for this solution. I'm always
delighted to see people using monadic combinators (like replicateM) in
the list monad, because I so rarely think to use them this way. Sadly,
my understanding of these combinators is still somewhat stuck in IO,
where I first learned them. I never would have thought to use <*> this
way if I had not seen Reid's solution first.

Also, for many applications, a non-sharing version like Reid's is really
what you want. Sharing versions have to keep references to old strings
around to reuse later, and so are really only appropriate for
applications which would keep them in memory anyway.

Regards,
Matthew