by on October 28, 2011
This time it’s Haskell - I bought myself a copy of the great book “Real World Haskell” by Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen and Don Stewart. Now I am just working my way through the chapters and trying to practice along the exercises.
The first one is a simple function that calculates the lengths of a given list. As far as I can see this function behaves pretty much the same like the in-built length function.
-- Write a function that computes the number of elements in a list. To test
-- it, ensure that it gives the same answers as the standard 'length'
-- function.
len :: [a] -> Int
len [] = 0
len (x:xs) = 1 + len xsThe second one is supposed to calculate the mean of the elements in the given list. My first approach used a self-written sum function using foldr. Later I noticed that there is an in-built function called sum already that I can use.
-- Compute a function that computes the mean of a list, i.e., the sum of all
-- elements in the list divided by its length. (You may need to use the
-- 'fromIntegral' function to convert the length of the list from an integer
-- into a floating-point number.)
mean [] = 0
mean lst = sum lst / fromIntegral (len lst)The next two ones are about palindrome numbers or collections. The first one returns a palindrome list by simply appending the reverse of the input list.
-- Turn a list into a palindrome; i.e., it should read the same both
-- backward and forward. For example, given the list [1,2,3], your function
-- should return [1,2,3,3,2,1]
to_palindrome lst = lst ++ reverse lstThe second function determines if the given list is palindromic by sequencially comparing the mirrored element pairs of the list.
-- Write a function that determines whether its input list is a palindrome.
is_palindrome [] = False
is_palindrome lst =
all (\x -> (lst !! x) == (lst !! (len-x-1))) [0..middle]
where
len = length lst
middle = len `div` 2Those functions do look really stupid simple but for an absolute beginner in Haskell it was kind of a hassle especially to get all those types right.
But nevertheless it’s quite interesting to slowly get a feel for those functional programming constructs. Also it makes fun to see that you are indeed able to solve these problems in the end after trying dozens of wrong approaches.