[Haskell-cafe] Ultra-newbie Question

[David Terei]

Here is a more manual way to do it, hopefully this shows the approach
required. You don't need to store anything, just keep removing the
head of the list until its of the size you want.

n_lastn :: Int -> [a] -> [a]
n_lastn n xs =
   let len = length xs - n
       drp = if len < 0 then 0 else len
       rmv 0    ys  = ys
       rmv m (y:ys) = rmv (m - 1) ys
   in rmv drp xs

Cheers,
David

On 18 September 2010 17:51, Christopher Tauss <ctauss1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Haskell Community -
>
> I am a professional programmer with 11 years experience, yet I just do not
> seem to be able to get the hang of even simple things in Haskell.  I am
> trying to write a function that takes a list and returns the last n
> elements.
>
> There may be a function which I can just call that does that, but I am
> trying to roll my own just to understand the concept.
>
> Let's call the function n_lastn and, given a list  [1,2,3,4,5], I would like
> n_lastn 3 = [3,4,5]
>
> Seems like it would be something like:
>
> n_lastn:: [a]->Int->[a]
> n_lastn 1 (xs) = last(xs)
> n_lastn n (x:xs) = ????
>
> The issue is I do not see how you can store the last elements of the list.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> ctauss
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