[Haskell-cafe] A small oversight

[Ben Millwood]

I can't answer your question (about getting minBy into the libraries)
but I thought I'd point out some tricks:

On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Also, constructions like
>
>  sortBy (compare `on` foo)
>
> must surely be very common.

Common enough that Data.Ord introduces comparing:

comparing :: (Ord a) => (b -> a) -> b -> b -> Ordering
comparing = (compare `on`)

see http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/html/Data-Ord.html#v%3Acomparing
But it would still be useful to have sortOn et al to capture the
common technique when your sorting property is potentially expensive
(sortOn length, for example):

sortOn f = map fst . sortBy (comparing snd) . map (\x -> (x, f x))

a technique which I believe is called a Schwarzian transform.

> Finally, take a look at this:
>
>  newtype SwapOrd x = SwapOrd (unswap_ord :: x) deriving Eq
>
>  instance Ord x => Ord (SwapOrd x) where
>   compare x y = swap_ord $ compare x y
>
>  swap_ord :: Ordering -> Ordering
>  swap_ord o = case o of
>   EQ -> EQ
>   GT -> LT
>   LT -> GT
>
> Just in case you wanted to sort things in reverse order. I think having
> swap_ord would be nice if nothing else...
>

swap_ord (compare x y) = compare y x, so usually flip compare fills
this requirement :)