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I was playing with Haskell and ghci when I found this which really bothers me:
foldl (++) [[3,4,5], [2,3,4], [2,1,1]] []
I expected to get this: [3,4,5,2,3,4,2,1,1]
However it gets:
[[3,4,5],[2,3,4],[2,1,1]]
As far as I understand foldl, it should be this:
(([] ++ [3, 4, 5]) ++ [2, 3, 4]) ++ [2, 1, 1]
If I type this in ghci it really is [3,4,5,2,3,4,2,1,1].
And the other strange thing is this:
Prelude> foldl1 (++) [[3,4,5], [2, 3, 4], [2, 1, 1]]
[3,4,5,2,3,4,2,1,1]
I expect foldl and foldl1 to behave in the same way. So what does foldl actually do?
308
Haskell : foldl. Description: it takes the second argument and the first item of the list and applies the function to them, then feeds the function with this result and the second argument and so on. See scanl for intermediate results.
Only foldr is lazy and can be used for codata/infinite streams. While foldl is tail-recursive (enhanced with strict application foldl' can avoid stack overflow). This is why foldr should be used by default in Haskellin order preserve laziness across function composition.
In functional programming, fold (also termed reduce, accumulate, aggregate, compress, or inject) refers to a family of higher-order functions that analyze a recursive data structure and through use of a given combining operation, recombine the results of recursively processing its constituent parts, building up a ...
The order of arguments is wrong. The right one is:
foldl (++) [] [[3,4,5], [2,3,4], [2,1,1]]
(That is, first the accumulator, then the list.)
89
You switched the arguments around. foldl takes the accumulator's starting value first, then the list to fold. So what happens in your case is that foldl folds over the empty list and thus returns the starting value, which is [[3,4,5], [2, 3, 4], [2, 1, 1]]. This will do what you want:
foldl (++) [] [[3,4,5], [2, 3, 4], [2, 1, 1]]
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