(Haskell) Parse error in pattern after Currying - haskell

I am getting a parse error after I changed this:
h :: ([Int],Int,[Int])->[[Int]]
h ([],k,x) =[[]]
h(y:[],k,x) = [x++k:[y]]
h(y:xs,k,x)= [x++k:y:xs]++h(xs,k,x++[y])
to this: at line 3
h :: [Int]->Int->[Int]->[[Int]]
h [] k x =[[]]
h (y:[]) k x = [x++k:[y]]
h y:xs k x = [x++k:y:xs]++h(xs,k,x++[y])

There are two problems with this line:
h y:xs k x = [x++k:y:xs]++h(xs,k,x++[y])
^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(1) (2)
You need parens around this pattern - (y:xs)
Unlike in other languages like C, Java, C#, etc, in Haskell you don't use commas to separate parameters to functions.

Related

Why does matching this function parameter seprately work, but not with guards. (Haskell)

So, I have been trying to use SDL to make a simple GUI. This is so that I start to understand how to use haskell. In this case, I was using https://github.com/palf/haskell-sdl2-examples/blob/master/examples/lesson04/src/Lesson04.hs as reference.
Pay attention, in particular to payloadToIntent on line 72.
payloadToIntent :: SDL.EventPayload -> Intent
payloadToIntent SDL.QuitEvent = Quit
payloadToIntent (SDL.KeyboardEvent k) = getKey k
payloadToIntent _ = Idle
This works perfectly. However, when I change the code to the following, it produces an error. Why does it happen, as to my (admittedtly novice) eyes, this looks equivalent.
payloadToIntent e
| e == SDL.QuitEvent = Quit
| e == SDL.KeyboardEvent k = getKey SDL.KeyboardEvent k
| otherwise = Idle
Error:
src/Events/Intent.hs:15:28: error:
Variable not in scope: k :: SDL.KeyboardEventData
|
15 | | e == SDL.KeyboardEvent k = getKey SDL.KeyboardEvent
| ^
I am using these language extensions: OverloadedStrings, GADTs, PatternGuards
So why did this happen? How could I fix this? Which one would be more idiomatic haskell?
(==) is a function that takes two values of the same type and compares them for equality, returning a Bool. SDL.KeyboardEvent k is not a value of any type (since k is unbound), so you can't compare it with (==).
The idiomatic "choice" is the one that works, i.e. pattern matching. If you want something that has a similar appearance, you can pattern match with case...of instead:
payloadToIntent e = case e of
SDL.QuitEvent -> Quit
SDL.KeyboardEvent k -> getKey k
_ -> Idle
The key idea here is: patterns define variables, bringing them into scope, while expressions do not, requiring all the variables in them to be already defined.
The guard e == SDL.KeyboardEvent k is a boolean valued expression, not a pattern. This is calling function (==) with two arguments: e and SDL.KeyboardEvent k. Your definition, to the compiler, looks like:
payloadToIntent e
| isEqual e SDL.QuitEvent = Quit
| isEqual e (SDL.KeyboardEvent k) = getKey SDL.KeyboardEvent k
| otherwise = Idle
The compiler can not call the equality-test function without passing it the arguments. For that, it needs variable k to be in scope, i.e., to be defined somewhere else.
To stress the point, consider this non-working code:
isSquare :: Int -> String
isSquare n | n == m*m = "It's the square of " ++ show m
| otherwise = "It isn't a square"
This would magically invert the squaring, if possible. That is, however, asking too much to the compiler, which won't magically solve the equation for us. (Indeed, the solution could even fail to be unique!)
As an even more cumbersome case:
f x | x == F y || x == G z = ...
Even if this worked, can we use y or z in the final ...? Probably not. Why should then this be allowed?
Finally, note that, even in those cases where it could work, allowing expressions guards to define variables could be a bad idea. Consider this:
c :: Int
c = 7
f x | x == F c = "Hi"
| otherwise = "there"
Now, is the c in F c a new local variable which is defined on the spot, or is it the constant 7 defined above? If we call f (F 6) do we get Hi (c was a new variable) or there (c was 7)?
Pattern matching avoids this issue by requiring a distinct syntax.

More general pattern matching

If I have a function, for example
f :: Int -> Int -> Int
f x y = x + y
and I want to have different functionality based on the parameters, I use pattern matching.
I have only found the syntax of how to match against concrete values, e.g.
f 0 y = y
Is it possible to match against something more general?
I would like to have different functionality in the case that the first parameter is less than 0. A second case could be if the second parameter exceeds a certain value.
You can use guards:
f x y | x < 0 = ...
f x y | y > someValue = ...
f x y | otherwise = ...
Sure, there is a mechanism called guards for that:
f x y | x < 0 = y

Prelude exponentiation is hard to understand

I was reading the Haskell Prelude and finding it pretty understandable, then I stumbled upon the exponention definition:
(^)              :: (Num a, Integral b) => a -> b -> a
x ^ 0            =  1
x ^ n | n > 0    =  f x (n-1) x
where f _ 0 y = y
f x n y = g x n  where
g x n | even n  = g (x*x) (n `quot` 2)
| otherwise = f x (n-1) (x*y)
_ ^ _            = error "Prelude.^: negative exponent"
I do not understand the need for two nested wheres.
What I understood so far:
(^)              :: (Num a, Integral b) => a -> b -> a
The base must be a number and the exponent intege, ok.
x ^ 0            =  1
Base case, easy.
g x n | even n  = g (x*x) (n `quot` 2)
| otherwise = f x (n-1) (x*y)
Exponention by squaring... kind of ... Why is the f helper needed? Why are f and g given single letter names? Is it just optimization, am I missing something obvious?
_ ^ _            = error "Prelude.^: negative exponent"
N > 0 was checked before, N is negative if we arrived here, so error.
My implementation would be a direct translation to code of:
Function exp-by-squaring(x, n )
if n < 0 then return exp-by-squaring(1 / x, - n );
else if n = 0 then return 1; else if n = 1 then return x ;
else if n is even then return exp-by-squaring(x * x, n / 2);
else if n is odd then return x * exp-by-squaring(x * x, (n - 1) / 2).
Pseudocode from wikipedia.
To illustrate what #dfeuer is saying, note that the way f is written it either:
f returns a value
or, f calls itself with new arguments
Hence f is tail recursive and therefore can easily be transformed into a loop.
On the other hand, consider this alternate implementation of exponentiation by squaring:
-- assume n >= 0
exp x 0 = 1
exp x n | even n = exp (x*x) (n `quot` 2)
| otherwise = x * exp x (n-1)
The problem here is that in the otherwise clause the last operation performed is a multiplication. So exp either:
returns 1
calls itself with new arguments
calls itself with some new arguments and multiplies the result by x.
exp is not tail recursive and therefore cannot by transformed into a loop.
f is indeed an optimization. The naive approach would be "top down", calculating x^(n `div` 2) and then squaring the result. The downside of this approach is that it builds a stack of intermediate computations. What f lets this implementation do is to first square x (a single multiplication) and then raise the result to the reduced exponent, tail recursively. The end result is that the function will likely operate entirely in machine registers. g seems to help avoid checking for the end of the loop when the exponent is even, but I'm not really sure if it's a good idea.
As far as I understand it exponentiation is solved by squaring as long as the exponent is even.
This leads to the answer why f is needed in case of an odd number - we use f to return the result in the case of g x 1, in every other odd case we use f to get back in the g-routine.
You can see it best I think if you look at an example:
x ^ n | n > 0 = f x (n-1) x
where f _ 0 y = y
f x n y = g x n
where g x n | even n = g (x*x) (n `quot` 2)
| otherwise = f x (n-1) (x*y)
2^6 = -- x = 2, n = 6, 6 > 0 thus we can use the definition
f 2 (6-1) 2 = f 2 5 2 -- (*)
= g 2 5 -- 5 is odd we are in the "otherwise" branch
= f 2 4 (2*2) -- note that the second '2' is still in scope from (*)
= f 2 4 (4) -- (**) for reasons of better readability evaluate the expressions, be aware that haskell is lazy and wouldn't do that
= g 2 4
= g (2*2) (4 `quot` 2) = g 4 2
= g (4*4) (2 `quot` 2) = g 16 1
= f 16 0 (16*4) -- note that the 4 comes from the line marked with (**)
= f 16 0 64 -- which is the base case for f
= 64
Now to your question of using single letter function names - that's the kind of thing you have to get used to it is a way most people in the community write. It has no effect on the compiler how you name your functions - as long as they start with a lower case letter.
As others noted, the function is written using tail-recursion for efficiency.
However, note that one could remove the innermost where while preserving tail-recursion as follows: instead of
x ^ n | n > 0 = f x (n-1) x
where f _ 0 y = y
f x n y = g x n
where g x n | even n = g (x*x) (n `quot` 2)
| otherwise = f x (n-1) (x*y)
we can use
x ^ n | n > 0 = f x (n-1) x
where f _ 0 y = y
f x n y | even n = f (x*x) (n `quot` 2) y
| otherwise = f x (n-1) (x*y)
which is also arguably more readable.
I have however no idea why the authors of the Prelude chose their variant.

Haskell take sum recursively

Hello I want to take a sum of functions call in Haskel but I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong. To be more specific, I have a function f(a,b,c)=a+b+c and I want to take an int like this:
x=Sum( from i=0 to i=c) f(1,1,i)
so far I have written this, but it doesn't even compile. Can you help me?
f a b c = a+b+c
my_sum f a b c+1 =f a b c+1 + my_sum f a b c
I get parse error in pattern my_sum
eg for my_sum f 1 1 5 the result would be f(1,1,5)+f(1,1,4)+f(1,1,3)+f(1,1,2)+f(1,1,1)
I dont want to use lists
n+k patterns are bad
Your code:
my_sum f a b c+1 =f a b c+1 + my_sum f a b c
includes a pattern in the form c+1 which A) should have parentheses B) Needs a base case (I assume you want to stop when c == 0) and C) is a syntactic form that has been removed from the language.
Instead, explicitly subtract 1 from c when you want and be sure to handle the base case:
my_sum f a b 0 = f a b 0
my_sum f a b n = f a b n + my_sum f a b (n-1)
This also has a memory leak meaning it will build up a large computation in the form f1 + (f a b n' + (f a b n'' + (f a b n''' + (.... You can handle the leak by using an accumulator or a higher level function and optimization at compile-time.
A cleaner Solution
List comprehension strikes me as the most reasonable solution here:
sum [f a b i | i <- [0..c] ]
The sum of the function f applied to arugments a, b and finally i where i ranges from 0 to c inclusively.
You can't have the c+1 on the left side of a definition. Since you're just summing, it doesn't matter if you count up from 0 to c or count down from c to 0, so you could instead do
my_sum f a b 0 = f a b 0
my_sum f a b c = f a b c + my_sum f a b (c - 1)
Then you could use it as
> let g x y z = x + y + z
> my_sum g 0 0 10
55
Some more detail on why your code failed to compile: Whenever you have a pattern on the left side of a definition, such as
fib 0 = 1
fib 1 = 1
fib n = fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2)
You can only match on constructors, names (like n or c), and literals (which are essentially constructors for the basic types). The function + is not a constructor, it is a function belonging to the Num typeclass, so therefore you can not pattern match on it. You may be confused from seeing list pattern matching before because it uses an operator:
myListSum [] = 0
myListSum (x:xs) = x + myListSum xs
but in fact, : is the Cons constructor for lists, and [] is the empty list constructor. You can think of the list type defined as
data [a] = [] | a : [a]
Or, if you were to replace all the symbols with words
data List a = Empty | Cons a (List a)
although its a bit different in reality since there's more that goes into defining lists, but that's the basic idea. This means that a pattern like
f [] = ...
f (x:xs) = ...
Is equivalent to
f Empty = ...
f (Cons x xs) = ...
just with more convenient syntax.
However, Int can be though of as a very large ADT defined as
data Int = -2147483648 | -2147483647 | ... | -1 | 0 | 1 | ... | 2147483646 | 2147483647
where each number itself is a different constructor. Then you can match on any individual number, but not anything like (x + 1) or (x * 2), because + and * are not constructors, just regular functions. (Note: Int is not actually defined this way because that would be really inefficient, it's defined at a more primitive level)
You can get from list formulations to the non-list, recursive formulations, with manual inlining and fusing of the functions in play:
{-# LANGUAGE BangPatterns #-}
import Data.List
f a b c = a+b+c
g f a b c = sum . map (f a b) $ [0..c]
= foldl' (\ !x y -> x + f a b y) 0 $ enumFromTo 0 c
= h 0 0 where
h !acc i | i > c = acc
| otherwise = h (acc + f a b i) (i+1)
Strictness annotations prevent uncontrolled build-up of thunks and stack overflow for big values of c.

Why can't pattern-matching-definition be a closure in Haskell?

Why are these pseudo-Haskell function definitions not accepted?
f n = if n<3 then n else g 2 2 1 0 where
g n a b c = a -- note that 'n' is a value of the enclosing scope
g k a b c = g (k+1) (a+2*b+3*c) a b
which computes this "exercise-function": f(n) = n if n<3 else f(n-1) + 2*f(n-2) + 3*f(n-3)
fib n = let
f n a b = b -- note that 'n' is a value of the enclosing scope
f k a b = f (k+1) b (a+b)
in f 1 0 1
for computing fibonacci numbers. Of course this works:
fib n = let { f k a b = if k==n then b else f (k+1) b (a+b);} in f 1 0 1
But in both the example with where and the one with let, I get
Warning: Pattern match(es) are overlapped
Why can't I define a function-closure using pattern matching with a value that I get from the enclosing scope?
Is that because the value from the enclosing scope is determined (in general) at runtime and for some reason (What reason?) the compiler cannot orchestrate that?
This is a language design choice: pattern matching can't be done on variables. It avoid tricky brain gymnastic to decide whether or not you pattern match against an existing variable or if you declare a local variable. Actually, take a look at this example:
Foo.hs:
module Foo where
foo: Int = 42
Bar.hs:
module Bar where
import Foo
bar :: Int -> Bool
bar foo = True
bar _ = False
You can't easily guess that foo is bound by looking at Bar.hs. Having a syntax where the context is required to decide whether you declare a new variable or use an existing one is misleading.
As a workaround, you can still use guards:
f n = if n<3 then n else g 2 2 1 0 where
g k a _ _ | k == n = a
g k a b c = g (k+1) (a+2*b+3*c) a b
or
f n = if n<3 then n else g 2 2 1 0 where
g k a b c | k == n = a
| otherwise = g (k+1) (a+2*b+3*c) a b

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