On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Will Ness
Derek Elkins
writes: On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Will Ness
wrote: Hello cafe,
I wonder, if we have List.insert and List.union, why no List.merge (:: Ord a => [a] -> [a] -> [a]) and no List.minus ? These seem to be pretty general operations.
Presumably by List.minus you mean the (\\) function in Data.List.
No, it has to search its second list over and over from the start, to be able to deal with unordered lists, so its performance can't be good.
Then use the ordlist one.
You probably also want to look at the package data-ordlist on hackage (http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/data-ordlist/0.0.1/doc/html/Data... OrdList.html) which represents sets and bags as ordered lists and has all of the operations you mention.
I did, thanks again! Although, that package deals with non-decreasing lists, i.e. lists with multiples possibly. As such, its operations produce non- decreasing lists, i.e. possibly having multiples too.
It is clear that some of the operations are guaranteed to produce sets given sets. The documentation could be better in this regard though.
I meant strictly increasing ordered lists, without multiples, for which the two operations, 'merge' and 'minus', would also have to produce like lists, i.e strictly increasing, without multiples.
The 'union' and 'minus' functions of ordlist meet this requirement if you satisfy the preconditions.