I'm doing a bit of self study on functional languages (currently using Haskell). I came across a Haskell based assignment which requires defining map and filter in terms of foldr. For the life of me I'm not fully understanding how to go about this.
For example when I define a map function like:
map' :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map' f [] = []
map' f (x:xs) = foldr (\x xs -> (f x):xs) [] xs
I don't know why the first element of the list is always ignored. Meaning that:
map' (*2) [1,2,3,4]
results in [4,6,8] instead of [2,4,6,8]
Similarly, my filter' function:
filter' :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> [a]
filter' p [] = []
filter' p (x:xs) = foldr (\x xs -> if p x then x:xs else xs ) [] xs
when run as:
filter' even [2,3,4,5,6]
results in [4,6] instead of [2,4,6]
Why would this be the case? And how SHOULD I have defined these functions to get the expected results? I'm assuming something is wrong with my lambda expressions...
I wish I could just comment, but alas, I don't have enough karma.
The other answers are all good ones, but I think the biggest confusion seems to be stemming from your use of x and xs.
If you rewrote it as
map' :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map' f [] = []
map' f (x:xs) = foldr (\y ys -> (f y):ys) [] xs
you would clearly see that x is not even mentioned on the right-hand side, so there's no way that it could be in the solution.
Cheers
Precicely. Thus it should become clear that
map' f xsinstead ofmap' f (x:xs)should solve the problem.Btw GHC can be an aid in seeing it when option
-Wallis used:Warning: Defined but not used: 'x'(or, for the original code:This binding for 'x' shadows the existing binding)Now, you should have enough karma and a nice badge on top ;)
Thanks, you were right... my usage of x & xs was confusing me! This really made it much clearer.
please, replace
map' f (x:xs)bymap' f xsas suggested by Dan Burton