Cartesian product in clojure

Question

I'm trying to implement a method that will take a list of lists and return a the cartesian product of these lists.

Here's what I have so far:

(defn cart


([] '())
 ([l1] (map list l1))
 ([l1 l2] 
  (map 
    (fn f[x] (map
    (fn g [y] (list x y))
    l2))
      l1)
      )

)

(defn cartesian-product [& lists] 
      (reduce cart lists)

 )





;test cases 
(println (cartesian-product '(a b) '(c d))) ; ((a c) (a d) (b c) (b d))
(println (cartesian-product ())) ;()
(println (cartesian-product '(0 1)))    ; ((0) (1))
(println (cartesian-product '(0 1) '(0 1))) ; ((0 0) (0 1) (1 0) (1 1))
(println (apply cartesian-product (take 4 (repeat (range 2))))) ;((0 0 0 0) (0 0 0 1) (0 0 1 0) (0 0 1 1) (0 1 0 0) (0 1 0 1) (0 1 1 0) (0 1 1 1) (1 0 0 0) (1 0 0 1) (1 0 1 0) (1 0 1 1) (1 1 0 0) (1 1 0 1) (1 1 1 0) (1 1 1 1))

The problem is my solution is really 'brackety'.

(((a c) (a d)) ((b c) (b d)))
()
(0 1)
(((0 0) (0 1)) ((1 0) (1 1)))
(((((((0 0) (0 1)) 0) (((0 0) (0 1)) 1)) 0) (((((0 0) (0 1)) 0) (((0 0) (0 1)) 1)) 1)) ((((((1 0) (1 1)) 0) (((1 0) (1 1)) 1)) 0) (((((1 0) (1 1)) 0) (((1 0) (1 1)) 1)) 1)))

I tried adding

      (apply concat(reduce cart lists))

but then I get a crash like so:

((a c) (a d) (b c) (b d))
()
IllegalArgumentException Don't know how to create ISeq from: java.lang.Long clojure.lang.RT.seqFrom (RT.java:494)

So, I think I'm close but missing something. However since I'm so new to clojure and functional programming I could be on the completely wrong track. Please help! :)

Answer 1

This is a lot easier to do as a for-comprehension than by trying to work out the recursion manually:

(defn cart [colls]
  (if (empty? colls)
    '(())
    (for [more (cart (rest colls))
          x (first colls)]
      (cons x more))))

user> (cart '((a b c) (1 2 3) (black white)))
((a 1 black) (a 1 white) (a 2 black) (a 2 white) (a 3 black) (a 3 white) 
 (b 1 black) (b 1 white) (b 2 black) (b 2 white) (b 3 black) (b 3 white) 
 (c 1 black) (c 1 white) (c 2 black) (c 2 white) (c 3 black) (c 3 white))

The base case is obvious (it needs to be a list containing the empty list, not the empty list itself, since there is one way to take a cartesian product of no lists). In the recursive case, you just iterate over each element x of the first collection, and then over each cartesian product of the rest of the lists, prepending the x you've chosen.

Note that it's important to write the two clauses of the for comprehension in this slightly unnatural order: swapping them results in a substantial slowdown. The reason for this is to avoid duplicating work. The body of the second binding will be evaluated once for each item in the first binding, which (if you wrote the clauses in the wrong order) would mean many wasted copies of the expensive recursive clause. If you wish to be extra careful, you can make it clear that the two clauses are independent, by instead writing:

(let [c1 (first colls)]
  (for [more (cart (rest colls))
        x c1]
    (cons x more)))