Not having participated in haskell' before, I'm not sure how
to put these perfecting amendments--mot langauge changes--into
the pot.
Doug McIlroy
The specification of List.transpose does not tell what a "column"
of a ragged-right list of rows is, either directly or by example.
Here is a fuller spec, plus some properties.
-----------------------------------------------------
A generalization of the customary matrix operation, transpose returns
a list of columns extracted from a list of rows. The jth column
of x::[[a]] comprises all extant elements x!!i!!j ordered by i.
In the subdomain of list structures that have positive nonincreasing
row lengths, e.g. matrices and Young tableaux,
transpose . transpose === id
(transpose x) !! i !! j === x !! j !! i
In general
transpose . transpose . transpose === transpose
sum . map length . transpose === sum . map length
Example: transpose [[10,11],[20],[],[30,31,32]] === [[10,20,30],[11,31],[32]]
-----------------------------------------------------
The reference definition can be simplified:
transpose xss = case [h | (h:_) <- xss] of
[] -> []
hs -> hs : transpose [tss | (_:tss) <- xss]
