Scheme: Remove duplicated numbers from list

Question

I wrote this code to create a list from en number of arguments given

(define (create-list . e)
   e)

But I need it to remove any duplicated numbers from the list within this block itself.

I have tried and searched for hours and can't find a solution without placing dozens of lines of code on other blocks.

For example let's say my input is

(create-list . 2 2 3 5 5 )

I need the list created to be '(2 3 5) and not '(2 2 3 5 5 )...

The order of the numbers doesn't matter.

Answer 1

Basically, you need to do something like:

(define (create-list . e) (dedupe e))

I can think of a really simple but probably inefficient way to do this:

(define (dedupe e)
  (if (null? e) '()
      (cons (car e) (dedupe (filter (lambda (x) (not (equal? x (car e)))) 
                                    (cdr e))))))

If you can't use existing functions like filter, you can make one yourself:

(define (my-filter pred ls) 
  (cond ((null? ls) '())
        ((pred (car ls)) (cons (car ls) (my-filter pred (cdr ls))))
        (else (my-filter pred (cdr ls)))))

Answer 2

This one is faster:

(define (remove-duplicates l)
  (cond ((null? l)
         '())
        ((member (car l) (cdr l))
         (remove-duplicates (cdr l)))
        (else
         (cons (car l) (remove-duplicates (cdr l))))))

But even better, mit-scheme provides delete-duplicates, which does exactly what you want.