Proposal: Add filterM or filterA to Data.Sequence

[David Feuer]

There won't be any such numbers in this case, because access to the
details of the sequence structure does not seem to help implement this
function. The same is true of the following, all of which already
exist:

replicate, replicateM, iterateN  -- all are implemented using replicateA
unfoldr, unfoldl --implemented using <| and |>
null -- can be written just as well using  null xs = case viewl xs of
{EmptyL -> True; _ -> False}
scanl, scanr, scanl1, scanr1 -- defined ultimately in terms of traverse
spanl, spanr, breakl, breakr, takeWhile, dropWhile -- defined in terms
of splitAt
findIndicesL, findIndicesR -- defined in terms of foldlWithIndex, foldrWithIndex
take, drop -- previously defined using splitAt; currently defined
using splitAt', but those two functions are likely to merge
filter -- uses foldl
elemIndexL, elemIndicesL, elemIndexR, elemIndicesR, findIndexL,
findIndexR -- all defined using findIndicesL and findIndicesR
update -- uses adjust
zip, zipWith3, zip3, zipWith4, zip4 -- All defined from zipWith

I think almost all of these functions are good to have around
(although the elemIndex family seems a bit silly). Adding a few more
to round things out seems reasonable to me as well.


On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 5:41 PM, Milan Straka <fox at ucw.cz> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>> -----Original message-----
>> From: David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com>
>> Sent: 30 Dec 2014, 13:15
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > We should check that `filterM . toList` isn't as fast. That was the case for
>> > bytestring and we rejected adding filterM there for that reason.
>>
>> Let me expand that definition to what it really looks like:
>>
>>   filterMSeq f = fmap fromList . filterM f . toList
>>
>> Yes, you can do this. Yes, it's probably even pretty efficient. But
>> it's a bit painful to have to expand things out like this just to
>> switch a bit of code from lists to sequences.
>
> the problem with this is that there are really many functions that
> "would be useful", but we do not really want to add them all.
>
> A general rule I have been using is "can this be implemented
> straightforwardly using existing methods without hurting performance
> much"? So I would like to see the numbers, please.
>
> Also, filterM is not yet settled in base, so we should wait some time
> until it is.
>
> Cheers,
> Milan
>
> PS: It is a shame we cannot reuse Foldable and/or Traversable for
> filtering. Maybe we should add a new Filterable class?