[Haskell-beginners] A better way?
keithshep at gmail.com
Sat Feb 21 21:38:07 EST 2009
Thanks, this code looks cleaner than what I had. I like how zipWithD
fixes the whole issue of uneven rows...
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Daniel Fischer
<daniel.is.fischer at web.de> wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 22. Februar 2009 01:32 schrieb Keith Sheppard:
>> ghci still is not happy if we have many rows...
>> Prelude> :load Table.IO
>> [1 of 1] Compiling Table.IO ( Table/IO.hs, interpreted )
>> Ok, modules loaded: Table.IO.
>> *Table.IO> let maxTableColumnWidths = foldr ((evalList .) . zipWithD
>> max)  . map (map length)
>> *Table.IO> let maxTCWs = evalList . foldr (zipWithD max)  . map (map
>> length) *Table.IO> maxTableColumnWidths (replicate 1000000 ["hello",
>> "world"]) *** Exception: stack overflow
> Yes, foldr was the wrong choice. make it foldl' (don't forget the prime at the
> end) and it works for large tables. If the rows are short, it actually is
> faster (here) than your version, but if the rows are long , e.g.
> maxTableColumnWidths (replicate 2000 (replicate 1000 "what?"))
> your version is faster than
> import Data.List (foldl')
> seqList  = False
> seqList (head:tail)
> | head `seq` False = undefined
> | otherwise = seqList tail
> evalList xs
> | seqList xs = undefined
> | otherwise = xs
> zipWithD :: (a -> a -> a) -> [a] -> [a] -> [a]
> zipWithD f (x:xt) (y:yt) = f x y:zipWithD f xt yt
> zipWithD _  ys = ys
> zipWithD _ xs  = xs
> maxTableColumnWidths =
> foldl' ((evalList .) . zipWithD max)  . map (map length)
>> *Table.IO> maxTCWs (replicate 1000000 ["hello", "world"])
>> *** Exception: stack overflow
> That doesn't surprise me in the least. One has to force the list in each step.
>> I hadn't thought of using ByteStrings since I don't know what they are
> ByteStrings are basically byte arrays. Thus if you're dealing exclusively with
> characters in the range 0-255, you need only one byte per character, while
> with Strings, you need four bytes for each character itself, plus several
> machine words for pointers (list cell to Char, list cell to next), I don't
> remember, but I think it amounts to 12 or 20 bytes per character.
>> :-). I'll have to look into it, but I'm assuming that ByteStrings will
>> give some constant time/space improvement?
> Can be several orders of magnitude faster, and as said above, they use far
> less memory (but they're useful only for long enough strings, having a
> multitude of short ByteStrings floating around doesn't do any good).
>> I think it won't help with
>> my first problem though since what's happening is that the lazy
>> function calls are piling up too deep (at least thats what I think is
> Yes, that's basically what *** Exception: stack overflow means :)
>> Thank you
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