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

[Lee Duhem]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Matthew Brecknell<haskell at brecknell.org> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I changed your solution from "tail $ concat $ iterate ..." to
"concat $ tail $ iterate ...", because I think cut useless part out early
is good idea, forgot to mention that, sorry.

>
> 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.

Actually, I first figure out how Reid's solution works, then figure out yours.
After that, I found, for me, your solution's logic is easier to understand,
so I take it as my first example. As I said at the end, or as I'll
said at the end,
Reid' solution and yours are the same (except effective)

lee