Here is my suggestion: separation of concerns. Your functions are doing multiple things at once (and there are inefficiencies in your code that are not easy to see because it does do several things at once). You want the smallest word that an int will fit in. Sounds like you'll need a useful helper function: roundUpToPowerOf2 :: Int -> Int roundUpToPowerOf2 n = f 1 where f x = if x >= n then x else f (x*2) Prelude> [(n,roundUpToPowerOf2 n) | n <- [1..10]] [(1,1),(2,2),(3,4),(4,4),(5,8),(6,8),(7,8),(8,8),(9,16),(10,16)] Now wordSize is easy: wordSize :: [a] -> Int wordSize = roundUpToPowerOf2 . length Prelude> wordSize [1..5] 3 The second task appears to be just zero padding a list ns on the left to get to a length of wordSize ns. For this you can avoid the double reversing of ns, again by separating concerns: We know how long the list is, and how long we want it to be. The difference is how many zeroes to add: numZeroesToAdd :: Int -> Int numZeroesToAdd n = roundUpToPowerOf2 n - n We don't want to make an intermediate list of zeroes and append, since that could be wasteful. Just keep adding a zero to the head of our list until it gets big enough. Our list is not copied (i.e. it is shared with the tail of the result) this way, saving making a copy during reverse. But it's good to keep things general until we need to be specific. We want to do something to something over and over a known number of times. For this to be well-typed, f has to take a type to itself. f :: a -> a (In math-speak, this is an endofunction, or a function in a) applyNtimes :: (a -> a) -> Int -> a -> a This sounds like it should be in the library somewhere, but hoogle didn't find it, and it is easy enough to roll our own. It just counts down to zero, composing an f. applyNtimes f 3 = f . f . f . id Note that instead of applying f to something repeatedly, we drop the something and just compose f directly (in math-speak, we move from a group to its algebra), because what's interesting about applyNtimes is f, not what it's applied to. The "something" would just clutter things up. We start with the identity function: applyNtimes f n | n > 0 = f . applyNtimes f (n-1) | otherwise = id For list padding, our f is just (e:), cons'ing an e to the front of the list (again we keep it generalized to any e, since this logic doesn't depend on what e is, only that it has the right type. Not hardcoding an unnecessary detail is important for separation of concerns. padToPowerOf2 :: a -> [a] -> [a] padToPowerOf2 e xs = applyNtimes (e:) numZeroes xs where numZeroes = numZeroesToAdd (length xs) Now we are ready for intToBinWord: intToBinWord :: Int -> [Int] intToBinWord n = padToPowerOf2 0 (intToBin n) ------- Just for fun, we could rewrite this in point-free notation (but if this isn't fun, don't worry, it doesn't really improve anything!) intToBinWord n = padToPowerOf2 0 . intToBin $ n or more simply intToBinWord = padToPowerOf2 0 . intToBin ------- You didn't include a definition for intToBin, so I'll just make one up: intToBin :: Int -> [Int] intToBin n = take n (repeat 9) Now we see the fruits of our labor: *Go> intToBinWord 4 [9,9,9,9] *Go> intToBinWord 5 [0,0,0,9,9,9,9,9] *Go> intToBinWord 8 [9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9] *Go> intToBinWord 9 [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9] The main thing I'm trying to convince you of is that each function should pull its own weight, with no extra baggage, and always with an eye out for useful helper functions (like applyNtimes) that you can add to your bag of tricks. Each function is small and easily debuggable, and you can much more easily gauge the optimality of each factored step rather than a bloated function. Dan Weston PR Stanley wrote:

Hi folks Any comments and/or criticisms no matter how trivial on the following please:

wordSize :: [Int] -> Int wordSize xs = head (dropWhile (<(length xs)) $ iterate (*2) 8)

intToBinWord :: Int -> [Int] intToBinWord n = reverse (take elements (xs ++ repeat 0)) where xs = reverse (intToBin n) elements = wordSize xs

Thanks, Paul

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