Tight Code--A Puzzle in F#

Jomo Fisher — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 22:37:51 GMT

Jomo Fisher--Luke Hoban wrote something in a blog entry that resonated with me:

One of the most striking features of F# code is that it is very terse - ideas can typically be expressed with a small amount of code.

Don Syme once mentioned (I'm paraphrasing) that an aspirational goal for F# in the beginning was to make a compiler that could compile itself in less than 10,000 lines of code. Though that line count has since been passed I often get the sense that, with enough thought, I could boil whatever code I'm working on down to almost nothing.

Consider this coding problem (which I have since used as an interview question). Take a singly-linked-list of singly-linked-lists and pivot the inner values. For example say I have this list:

let have = [['a';'b';'1'];['c';'d';'2'];['e';'f';'3']]

Then the list I want is this:

let want = [['a';'c';'e'];['b';'d';'f'];['1';'2';'3']]

So the new list's first list has the first item from each of the original inner lists and so on. This problem actually came up in real-world piece of code I was working on. My first cut was procedural and about twenty lines of code. I don't have it here to show you, but after a few iterations and refactorings I got it down to a respectable nine lines:

let flatteninto source target =

    List.zip target source |> List.map(fun (head, tail)->head@[tail])

let pivot list =

    let rec work target = function

          head::tail-> work (flatteninto head target) tail

        | [] -> target

    let empties = list|>List.map(fun l->[])

    work empties list

At this point, I was stuck. It worked, but it seemed like there should be a better solution. In particular, the second to last line where I build up a list of empty lists didn't seem quite right. Being stuck, I asked my teammates whether there was a better solution out there. As it turns out, James Margetson had seen a beautiful four line solution to the problem.

I'll post the solution James showed me in a few days. In the meantime, I'd like to invite you to give the problem a try in the programming language of your choice. Can you cleanly beat my nine-line solution above? Can you get it down to four lines? I only ask that you don't change the input structure--singly-linked-list of singly-linked-list. Also, in my problem, the input was guaranteed to be well formed so I didn't need to check for jagged inner lists or other malformed inputs. Finally, notice that while I showed a 3x3 input in the example the dimensions don't have to be the same.

Update 11/20/2007 - Spoiler Alert!

As promised, here's the F# that James showed me

let rec transpose haves =

match haves with

| (_::_)::_ -> map hd haves :: transpose (map tl haves)

| _ -> []

This is essentially the same as the Haskell algorithm that has been posted in the comments.

I want to thank the folks who posted solutions in various different languages--Scheme, Haskell, Ruby, C#, Python. Also, there was an OCaml solution which is indeed compatible with F#.

Several folks pointed out the analogy with matrix transpose. The code does get a lot easier when your input is an array of arrays, but you don't always get to pick your input representation.

One commenter opined that functional code may be easier to read than it is to write. This is true for me in one sense: there seems to always be a way to write the code a little better. Figuring out when I'm done is a challenge.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Jomo Fisher -- Sharp Things : Puzzle

Tight Code--A Puzzle in F#