On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Andrew Coppin
Don Stewart wrote:
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/huffman
A simple and pure Haskell implementation of the Huffman encoding algorithm.
What the...?
Oh, I see. It uses another package to handle the tricky sorting and searching stuff. Well, yeah, that would make the code a bit shorter... ;-)
Quicksort is naturally expressed using filter and (++), etc. Huffman coding is naturally expressed in terms of priority queues, etc. Why is using the right vocabulary OK in one case and not in the other? This seems like an example of list-chauvinism -- what Chris Okasaki calls a communal blind spot of the FP community in Breadth-First Numbering: Lessons from a Small Exercise in Algorithm Design -- http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/icfp00.ps --Max