Parallel list comprehensions

[Jan-Willem Maessen]

On Feb 4, 2006, at 9:11 AM, John Hughes wrote:

> I noticed ticket #55--add parallel list comprehensions--which  
> according to
> the ticket, will probably be adopted. I would argue against.
> ...

I tend to agree.  But to back myself up, I thought I'd do an informal  
survey of uses of "zip" or "zipWith" in comprehensions.  I did this  
using "grep -C 5" and hand inspection, so tallys may be off by 1 or  
2.  I counted three things:
   1) Uses of "zip" and friends which could be replaced by zip  
comprehensions, but which weren't simply numbering the elements of a  
list (OK)
   2) Uses of the list numbering idiom "zip [n..] (...)" and "zip  
(...) [n...]" (Number)
   3) Uses of "zip" and friends which are not list numbering, and  
cannot be replaced by zip comprehensions. (Not OK)

Conclusion: Haskell would benefit from a library function for the  
list-numbering idiom.  (Plus, such a library would play nicely with  
any evaluation strategy you care to name...)  This would eliminate  
more than half the uses of "zip" in comprehension generators.

I was surprised to see that phc would have been the biggest  
beneficiary of zip comprehensions!

-Jan-Willem Maessen


OK = Could use zip comprehensions.
Number = zip [n..] (...) or zip (...) [n..]
Not OK = Can't use zip comprehensions---prior or subsequent clauses

                 OK      Number  Not OK
phc              6       1       5
Djinn                    4
DrIFT                    4
fps                      1
GHC             11      15      12
happy                   11
HSlibs/          2       8
libraries
----------------------------------------
Total           19      44      17