Re[Haskell-cafe] cursive to foldr

[David Menendez]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Ezra Lalonde <ezra.lalonde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Using the same basic structure you did, and foldr, I think below is the
> simplest method:
>
> ====================
> import Data.Maybe
>
> searchList :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> Maybe [a]
> searchList p xs = foldr (\x acc -> if p x then Just (x: fromMaybe [] acc)
> else acc) Nothing xs
> ====================

This might be considered simpler:

searchList p = foldr (\x -> if p x then Just . maybe [x] (x:) else id) Nothing

The real problem with searchList is that it's strict and can't be made
lazy. Because it returns Nothing when nothing matches the predicate,
it has to traverse the entire list before returning anything. Instead,
I would recommend filter, which can be used as-is or defined in terms
of foldr.

filter p = foldr (\x -> if p x then (x:) else id) []

Compare the behavior of "searchList even [0..]" and "filter even [0..]".

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>