Data.List.groupBy with non-transitive equality predicate

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 22:02 +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> I was used to use groupBy to split a list before every element that
> satisfies a predicate. E.g. splitting before every capital
> 
> Prelude> groupBy (\_ c -> not $ Char.isUpper c) "Hello World"
> ["Hello ","World"]
> 
> I also wanted to use this for splitting after specific elements.
> But this fails. I get
> 
> Prelude> groupBy (\c _ -> c /= ',') "1, 2, 3, 4"
> ["1, 2, 3, 4"]
> 
> but I wanted
> ["1,", " 2,", " 3,", " 4"]
> 
>  I assumed that 'groupBy' would compare adjacent elements, but it seems to
> compare the leading element of each block with subsequent elements. Since
> the documentation doesn't tell which elements are actually compared it
> seems to assume that the comparison is commutative and transitive. Maybe
> this point should be made clearer.
>  Additionally I think that comparing neighbouring elements is a useful
> behaviour and I suggest an according variant of 'groupBy' for Data.List.
> Opinions?

I noticed this interesting behaviour when implementing groupBy for lazy
bytestrings. My QC tests showed I had the wrong answer for
non-transative predicates. It was actually a lot harder to implement the
H98 behaviour than the behaviour where we compare adjacent elements. So
purely from an implementation point of view I'd be happy to change the
behaviour to that which you suggest.

Duncan