List comprehension in Haskell - haskell

I've been using the following code to get all combinations of a pre-determined amount of numbers:
getList x = [ [a,b,c] | a <- [1..x], b <- [1..x], c <- [1..x]]
This was fine to begin with, but I'm looking to expand the program to handle very large lists, and I keep thinking there must be a better way to do this. How would I create a function that takes the same parameter x as here, and also another parameter for how many items the sublists have. For four items I would go and modify the code:
getList x = [ [a,b,c,d] | a <- [1..x], b <- [1..x], c <- [1..x], d <- [1..x]]
It doesn't need to be a list comprehension. Thank you for any help.

I believe what you want would be the replicateM function in Control.Monad.
The list monad is based on "trying all possible combinations", and plain replicate creates a list by repeating an item some number of times. So the result of replicateM is, given some list of possible values, a list of all possible ways to select an item from that list some number of times.
For example:
> replicateM 2 [0, 1]
[[0,0],[0,1],[1,0],[1,1]]
> replicateM 3 [0, 1]
[[0,0,0],[0,0,1],[0,1,0],[0,1,1],[1,0,0],[1,0,1],[1,1,0],[1,1,1]]
So to extend your function to arbitrary repetitions, you'd use something like:
getListN n x = replicateM n [1..x]
...where your original getList would be equivalent to getListN 3.

In case, anyone likes a non-Monadic-solution to understand to inner workings (although, the soliution via replicateM is great!):
getListN n = foldl (\ass bs -> [ b:as | b <- bs, as <- ass]) [[]] . replicate n
Essentially, this implementation via foldl works exactly in the same way as the replacatM-solution does.

Related

How to make an infinite list of a..z concatenated with 1, then 2, etc

I'm trying to create an infinite list in Haskell which takes the letters a..z and then repeats them suffixed with 1 ("a1 ... z1"), then 2 ("a2".."z2"), etc.
At the moment the furthest I've got is using a list comprehension to generate a list of every string combination possible from the two lists of a-z and 1-9,
however I can't figure out how to then apply this to my problem. I have also tried to use the map function but couldn't figure how to apply it to my problem either
variables :: [Var]
variables = [x : y | y <- "" : variables, x <- ['a'..'z'] ++ ['0'..'9']]
Typing [variables !! i | i <- [0,1,25,26,27,100,3039]] into ghci should give:
["a","b","z","a1","b1","w3","x116"], but at the moment the result I'm getting is: ["a","b","z","0","1","2b","plb"]. Any help would be much appreciated
Use a comprehension a an infinite sequence:
Prelude> let variables = [l:show x | x <- [1..], l <- ['a'..'z']]
Prelude> take 100 variables
["a1","b1","c1","d1","e1","f1","g1","h1","i1","j1","k1","l1","m1","n1","o1","p1","q1","r1","s1","t1","u1","v1","w1","x1","y1","z1","a2","b2","c2","d2","e2","f2","g2","h2","i2","j2","k2","l2","m2","n2","o2","p2","q2","r2","s2","t2","u2","v2","w2","x2","y2","z2","a3","b3","c3","d3","e3","f3","g3","h3","i3","j3","k3","l3","m3","n3","o3","p3","q3","r3","s3","t3","u3","v3","w3","x3","y3","z3","a4","b4","c4","d4","e4","f4","g4","h4","i4","j4","k4","l4","m4","n4","o4","p4","q4","r4","s4","t4","u4","v4"]
Just use (++) over that list and ['a'..'z'] to prepend the single char lists, notice that since 'a' :: char you need to transform it to String beforehand
Prelude> let variables = [l:[] | l <- ['a'..'z']] ++ [l:show x | x <- [1..], l <- ['a'..'z']]
Prelude> take 100 variables
["a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z","a1","b1","c1","d1","e1","f1","g1","h1","i1","j1","k1","l1","m1","n1","o1","p1","q1","r1","s1","t1","u1","v1","w1","x1","y1","z1","a2","b2","c2","d2","e2","f2","g2","h2","i2","j2","k2","l2","m2","n2","o2","p2","q2","r2","s2","t2","u2","v2","w2","x2","y2","z2","a3","b3","c3","d3","e3","f3","g3","h3","i3","j3","k3","l3","m3","n3","o3","p3","q3","r3","s3","t3","u3","v3"]

List comprehensions with arguments drawn from the same list in Haskell

I've a question regarding list comprehensions in Haskell.
I have an exam later this week and therefore did some old exams where I found this question:
"Write a function that given a positive integer n returns a list of positive integers m ≤ n such that there are two positive integers x and y, such that x^2 + y^3 = m. The list needs to be sorted"
There were two possible answers,
either
squareCube::Int->[Int]
squareCube n =[a|a<-[1..n],x<-[1..n],y<-[1..n],x^2+y^3==a]
or
import Data.List
squareCube::Int->[Int]
squareCube n =
sort [a|x<-[1..n],y<-[1..n],a<-[1..n],x^2+y^3==a]
I wonder why I need to use the sort function when a comes after x and y in my comprehension. Why does the order between the arguments matter?
This list is sorted:
[ 1, 1, 1
, 2, 2, 2
, 3, 3, 3
, 4, 4, 4 ]
This one isn't:
[ 1, 2, 3, 4
, 1, 2, 3, 4
, 1, 2, 3, 4 ]
This is only vaguely related to the question: it addresses the programming challenge, but does not answer the question as asked about why the existing approaches work. But it was too fun to avoid writing a snippet about it, so here goes.
With appropriate imports, you can very efficiently generate even the infinite list of square-cube sums. The basic idea is to make an infinite list of infinite lists; we will maintain the invariant that the outer infinite list is sorted by the heads of the inner infinite lists. Then it's easy and efficient to merge all of these. With the appropriate package it's a one-liner, and very succinctly matches the problem description:
import Data.List.Ordered
squareCubes = unionAll [[x^2+y^3 | x <- [1..]] | y <- [1..]]
We can compare the efficiency of this to the existing two approaches. Here's the test program, which I compiled with -O2:
import Data.List
import Data.List.Ordered
import System.Environment
squareCubes = unionAll [[x^2+y^3 | x <- [1..]] | y <- [1..]]
squareCube n = takeWhile (<=n) squareCubes
squareCube' n = [a|a<-[1..n],x<-[1..n],y<-[1..n],x^2+y^3==a]
squareCube'' n = sort [a|x<-[1..n],y<-[1..n],a<-[1..n],x^2+y^3==a]
main = do
[kind, limit] <- getArgs
let f = case kind of
"inf" -> squareCube
"unsorted" -> squareCube'
"sorted" -> squareCube''
print . sum . f . read $ limit
And here are the timings, which are quite stark indeed:
% /usr/bin/time ./test unsorted 700
57465
9.60user 0.01system 0:09.63elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4156maxresident)k
% /usr/bin/time ./test sorted 700
57465
1.87user 0.00system 0:01.87elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 4056maxresident)k
% /usr/bin/time ./test inf 700
50895
0.00user 0.00system 0:00.00elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 3616maxresident)k
The others take seconds (aeons in computer time) while the one that's in some ways more capable than the others doesn't even register on the timer! I also experimented to find how large of an input we could give before arriving at the timings for the other two implementations. I found that an input of 500000000 takes 8.88 seconds -- almost six orders of magnitude higher in the roughly the same time.
Wait, wait, you say: those outputs are different. So what gives? Well, it turns out that the slow implementations have what I consider to be a bug: they will spit out a single number multiple times if there are multiple ways to construct it as the sum of squares and cubes. For example,
> squareCube' 17
[2,5,9,10,12,17,17]
> squareCube 17
[2,5,9,10,12,17]
because 3^2 + 2^3 = 4^2 + 1^3. On the other hand, if this is the intended behavior, one can easily achieve it in the efficient, lazy one-liner by replacing unionAll with mergeAll.
We need a sort function when a comes after x and y in the comprehension because of the order of evaluation. If a <- [1..] is called first, each of the subsequent statements will be evaluated against each a in turn, so the a's already form an increasing list:
a = 1
x <- [1..n]
y <- [1..n]
...return a if there's a valid match
a = 2
x <- [1..n]
y <- [1..n]
...return a if there's a valid match
etc.
However, if a <- [1..n] is evaluated last, we may not get an ordered sequence of as:
x = 1
y <- [1..n]
...
y = 1
a <- [1..n]
...
a = 2 2
y = 2
a <- [1..n]
...
a = 9 9
x = 2
y <- [1..n]
...
y = 1
a <- [1..n]
...
a = 5 5
To see clearly what's going on with list comprehensions, try
do { print [ (x,[10..13]) | x <- [1,2]]
; print [ [(x,y) | y <- [10..13]] | x <- [1,2]]
; print [ r | x <- [1,2], r <- [(x,y) | y <- [10..13]]]
; print [ (x,y) | x <- [1,2], y <- [10..13] ]
}
=>
[ (1,[10,11,12,13]), (2,[10,11,12,13]) ]
[[(1,10),(1,11),(1,12),(1,13)], [(2,10),(2,11),(2,12),(2,13)]]
[ (1,10),(1,11),(1,12),(1,13), (2,10),(2,11),(2,12),(2,13) ]
[ (1,10),(1,11),(1,12),(1,13), (2,10),(2,11),(2,12),(2,13) ]
On the other hand,
do { print [ ([1,2],y) | y <- [10..13] ]
; print [ (x,y) | y <- [10..13], x <- [1,2] ]
}
=>
[ ([1,2],10), ([1,2],11), ([1,2],12), ([1,2],13) ]
[ (1,10),(2,10), (1,11),(2,11), (1,12),(2,12), (1,13),(2,13) ]
List comprehensions work in the nested fashion.
You could re-write your first code as
map (\(a,_,_) -> a) $
filter (\(a,x,y) -> x^2+y^3==a) $
liftA3 (,,) [1..n] [1..n] [1..n] -- (1)
and the second as
map (\(_,_,a) -> a) $
filter (\(x,y,a) -> x^2+y^3==a) $
liftA3 (,,) [1..n] [1..n] [1..n] -- (2)
You could be tempted to see (1) and (2) as a very general "all combinations of three elements drawn from same list" thing. But Haskell is a deterministic language. It produces the same results for the same inputs. Thus it imposes a certain order on the resulting list.
And this is what it means when we say that list comprehensions work in a nested fashion — the leftmost list's element changes the slowest, and the rightmost's the fastest, in the resulting combination — like in an odometer.
To solve your problem, you could write
sort [a | x2 <- takeWhile (<= n) [x^2 | x <- [1..]]
, a <- takeWhile (<= n) [x2+y^3 | y <- [1..]] ]
but this requires careful thought, the code doesn't express the original intent as clearly, and isn't still as optimal as the one using Data.List.Ordered.mergeAll (from data-ordlist package) as seen in the answer by Daniel Wagner,
takeWhile (<= n) . mergeAll $ [[x^2+y^3 | x <- [1..]] | y <- [1..]]
although both have the same time complexity, more or less. mergeAll merges the ordered non-decreasing lists it is presented with, by using pairwise merges arranged in a tree slanted to the right.
Come to think of it, we too could write the more natural-looking
sort . concat . map (takeWhile (<= n))
$ [[x^2+y^3 | x <- [1..n]] | y <- [1..n]]
This doesn't work with the infinite list of lists. To fix this, we could write
-- sort . concat . takeWhile (not . null) . map (takeWhile (<= n))
sort . concat . map (takeWhile (<= n)) . takeWhile ((<= n).head)
$ [[x^2+y^3 | x <- [1..]] | y <- [1..]]
In Haskell, it is quite often better not to try too hard to figure it all out ourselves, but leave it to the lazy evaluation to take care of things. Here it didn't quite worked unfortunately, and we had to take special care to be able to deal with infinite list1, with those explicit takeWhiles superfluous to the task's logic.
Indeed it is true, for any n, that
under n (union a b) == nub . sort $ under n a ++ under n b
under n . unionAll . take m == under n . foldl union [] . take m
under n . unionAll == nub . sort . concat
. takeWhile (not.null) . map (under n)
and
under n (merge a b) == sort $ under n a ++ under n b
under n . mergeAll . take m == under n . foldl merge [] . take m
under n . mergeAll == sort . concat
. takeWhile (not.null) . map (under n)
using under n = takeWhile (<= n), with ordered increasing lists.
1Data.List.Ordered.mergeAll takes care of the infinite lists all by itself, and is better in the sense that it is on-line - it starts producing its output much earlier than our tortured constructed function. The point wasn't that the library function isn't needed, but just to see what can be done without it.

Enumerate All Finite Sequences of Integers?

I want to write a Haskell list comprehension to enumerate all finite sequences of integers.
I'm pretty sure that this set is countable.
This is what I have so far:
enumIntSeqs = [ (x, [ ( x, [0..x] ) | x <- [ x | x <- [0..x] ] ] ) | x <- [0..] ]
Another idea I have is to somehow list every finite path in the infinite array
Z* X Z* where Z* = {0, 1, -1, 2, -2,...}
This is, indeed, possible. But it is not easy. Imagine you have an enumeration of all integers, an enumeration of all pairs of integers, an enumeration of all triples of integers, etc. Then you need to choose "fairly" from those enumerations to be sure to hit each element of each. A similar problem will arise when you try even to enumerate all pairs of integers. I suggest you start with that problem, and then look into something like Control.Monad.Omega, or perhaps even Control.Monad.Logic.
I am not going to spoil your fun by attempting a full answer, so let me just demonstrate a handful of things through the simplified problem of enumerating all finite, non-empty, sequences of contiguous naturals starting from zero -- something that you seem close to achieving on your own already. The key steps are already amidst your enumIntSeqs, but you don't have to nest list comprehensions like that. If you begin with...
[ {- etc. -} | x <- [0..] ]
... you can generate a new list for each x simply by doing...
[ {- etc. -} | x <- [0..], let ys = [0..x] ]
... and then returning those lists:
[ ys | x <- [0..], let ys = [0..x] ]
(Note that I didn't write ys <- [0..x]. Try to predict what would happen in that case, and then check it in GHCi.)
The separate let definition isn't necessary, nor does it add anything in terms of clarity in this simple comprehension, so we can just write:
[ [0..x] | x <- [0..] ]
And that's it.
Prelude> take 4 $ [ [0..x] | x <- [0..] ]
[[0],[0,1],[0,1,2],[0,1,2,3]]
P.S.: Two other ways of writing the enumeration. Using do-notation...
someIntSeqs = do
x <- [0..]
return [0..x]
... and with a humble fmap (which in this case is the same as map):
Prelude> take 4 $ fmap (\x -> [0..x]) [0..]
[[0],[0,1],[0,1,2],[0,1,2,3]]
Prelude> -- Or, equivalently...
Prelude> take 4 $ (\x -> [0..x]) <$> [0..]
[[0],[0,1],[0,1,2],[0,1,2,3]]
I don't know if this is what you want, because your question wasn't very clear, but given the example that you provided [0,1,-1,-2,2..], I'm going to give a few examples of how to produce a sorted list of integers, and change it according to your needs.
numberline :: Integer -> [Integer]
numberline n = line (-abs n) (abs n) []
where
line 0 0 l = (0:l)
line r s t = r : line (r+1) (s-1) (s:t)
What it does is to ensure that there is a positive and negative number, with the use of -abs and abs as inputs, so that the line function returns them in that order. Then, you only need to map this function to a list of an arbitrary size to get a list of lists with integers ranging from a negative number to its symmetric end.
map numberline [1..2] -- [[-1,0,1],[-2,-1,0,1,2]]
map numberline [1..] -- [[-1,0,1],[-2,-1,0,1,2],[-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3]..
So how do you change the above piece of code to generate an alternating path between integers as pairs of natural numbers in some array without repeating them?
countable :: Integer -> [Integer]
countable n = count (-abs n) (abs n) []
where
count 0 0 l = (0:l)
count r s t = count (r+1) (s-1) (s:r:t)
The end result being [0,1,-1,2,-2,3,-3] for countable 3. It's not very efficient for big numbers, so you may want to consider a list starting from the argument down to 0 instead of the other way around.
I hope that I helped.

Dovetail iteration over infinite lists in Haskell

I want to iterate 2 (or 3) infinite lists and find the "smallest" pair that satisfies a condition, like so:
until pred [(a,b,c) | a<-as, b<-bs, c<-cs]
where pred (a,b,c) = a*a + b*b == c*c
as = [1..]
bs = [1..]
cs = [1..]
The above wouldn't get very far, as a == b == 1 throughout the run of the program.
Is there a nice way to dovetail the problem, e.g. build the infinite sequence [(1,1,1),(1,2,1),(2,1,1),(2,1,2),(2,2,1),(2,2,2),(2,2,3),(2,3,2),..] ?
Bonus: is it possible to generalize to n-tuples?
There's a monad for that, Omega.
Prelude> let as = each [1..]
Prelude> let x = liftA3 (,,) as as as
Prelude> let x' = mfilter (\(a,b,c) -> a*a + b*b == c*c) x
Prelude> take 10 $ runOmega x'
[(3,4,5),(4,3,5),(6,8,10),(8,6,10),(5,12,13),(12,5,13),(9,12,15),(12,9,15),(8,15,17),(15,8,17)]
Using it's applicative features, you can generalize to arbitrary tuples:
quadrupels = (,,,) <$> as <*> as <*> as <*> as -- or call it liftA4
But: this alone does not eliminate duplication, of course. It only gives you proper diagonalization. Maybe you could use monad comprehensions together with an approach like Thomas's, or just another mfilter pass (restricting to b /= c, in this case).
List comprehensions are great (and concise) ways to solve such problems. First, you know you want all combinations of (a,b,c) that might satisfy a^2 + b^2 = c^2 - a helpful observation is that (considering only positive numbers) it will always be the case that a <= c && b <= c.
To generate our list of candidates we can thus say c ranges from 1 to infinity while a and b range from one to c.
[(a,b,c) | c <- [1..], a <- [1..c], b <- [1..c]]
To get to the solution we just need to add your desired equation as a guard:
[(a,b,c) | c <- [1..], a <- [1..c], b <- [1..c], a*a+b*b == c*c]
This is inefficient, but the output is correct:
[(3,4,5),(4,3,5),(6,8,10),(8,6,10),(5,12,13),(12,5,13),(9,12,15)...
There are more principled methods than blind testing that can solve this problem.
{- It depends on what is "smallest". But here is a solution for a concept of "smallest" if tuples were compared first by their max. number and then by their total sum. (You can just copy and paste my whole answer into a file as I write the text in comments.)
We will need nub later. -}
import Data.List (nub)
{- Just for illustration: the easy case with 2-tuples. -}
-- all the two-tuples where 'snd' is 'n'
tuples n = [(i, n) | i <- [1..n]]
-- all the two-tuples where 'snd' is in '1..n'
tuplesUpTo n = concat [tuples i | i <- [1..n]]
{-
To get all results, you will need to insert the flip of each tuple into the stream. But let's do that later and generalize first.
Building tuples of arbitrary length is somewhat difficult, so we will work on lists. I call them 'kList's, if they have a length 'k'.
-}
-- just copied from the tuples case, only we need a base case for k=1 and
-- we can combine all results utilizing the list monad.
kLists 1 n = [[n]]
kLists k n = do
rest <- kLists (k-1) n
add <- [1..head rest]
return (add:rest)
-- same as above. all the klists with length k and max number of n
kListsUpTo k n = concat [kLists k i | i <- [1..n]]
-- we can do that unbounded as well, creating an infinite list.
kListsInf k = concat [kLists k i | i <- [1..]]
{-
The next step is rotating these lists around, because until now the largest number is always in the last place. So we just look at all rotations to get all the results. Using nub here is admittedly awkward, you can improve that. But without it, lists where all elements are the same are repeated k times.
-}
rotate n l = let (init, end) = splitAt n l
in end ++ init
rotations k l = nub [rotate i l | i <- [0..k-1]]
rotatedKListsInf k = concatMap (rotations k) $ kListsInf k
{- What remains is to convert these lists into tuples. This is a bit awkward, because every n-tuple is a separate type. But it's straightforward, of course. -}
kListToTuple2 [x,y] = (x,y)
kListToTuple3 [x,y,z] = (x,y,z)
kListToTuple4 [x,y,z,t] = (x,y,z,t)
kListToTuple5 [x,y,z,t,u] = (x,y,z,t,u)
kListToTuple6 [x,y,z,t,u,v] = (x,y,z,t,u,v)
{- Some tests:
*Main> take 30 . map kListToTuple2 $ rotatedKListsInf 2
[(1,1),(1,2),(2,1),(2,2),(1,3),(3,1),(2,3),(3,2),(3,3),(1,4),(4,1),(2,4),(4,2),(3,4),
(4,3),(4,4),(1,5),(5,1),(2,5),(5,2),(3,5),(5,3),(4,5),(5,4),(5,5),(1,6),(6,1),
(2,6), (6,2), (3,6)]
*Main> take 30 . map kListToTuple3 $ rotatedKListsInf 3
[(1,1,1),(1,1,2),(1,2,1),(2,1,1),(1,2,2),(2,2,1),(2,1,2),(2,2,2),(1,1,3),(1,3,1),
(3,1,1),(1,2,3),(2,3,1),(3,1,2),(2,2,3),(2,3,2),(3,2,2),(1,3,3),(3,3,1),(3,1,3),
(2,3,3),(3,3,2),(3,2,3),(3,3,3),(1,1,4),(1,4,1),(4,1,1),(1,2,4),(2,4,1),(4,1,2)]
Edit:
I realized there is a bug: Just rotating the ordered lists isn't enough of course. The solution must be somewhere along the lines of having
rest <- concat . map (rotations (k-1)) $ kLists (k-1) n
in kLists, but then some issues with repeated outputs arise. You can figure that out, I guess. ;-)
-}
It really depends on what you mean by "smallest", but I assume you want to find a tuple of numbers with respect to its maximal element - so (2,2) is less than (1,3) (while standard Haskell ordering is lexicographic).
There is package data-ordlist, which is aimed precisely at working with ordered lists. It's function mergeAll (and mergeAllBy) allows you to combine a 2-dimensional matrix ordered in each direction into an ordered list.
First let's create a desired comparing function on tuples:
import Data.List (find)
import Data.List.Ordered
compare2 :: (Ord a) => (a, a) -> (a, a) -> Ordering
compare2 x y = compare (max2 x, x) (max2 y, y)
where
max2 :: Ord a => (a, a) -> a
max2 (x, y) = max x y
Then using mergeAll we create a function that takes a comparator, a combining function (which must be monotonic in both arguments) and two sorted lists. It combines all possible elements from the two lists using the function and produces a result sorted list:
mergeWith :: (b -> b -> Ordering) -> (a -> a -> b) -> [a] -> [a] -> [b]
mergeWith cmp f xs ys = mergeAllBy cmp $ map (\x -> map (f x) xs) ys
With this function, it's very simple to produce tuples ordered according to their maximum:
incPairs :: [(Int,Int)]
incPairs = mergeWith compare2 (,) [1..] [1..]
Its first 10 elements are:
> take 10 incPairs
[(1,1),(1,2),(2,1),(2,2),(1,3),(2,3),(3,1),(3,2),(3,3),(1,4)]
and when we (for example) look for the first pair whose sum of squares is equal to 65:
find (\(x,y) -> x^2+y^2 == 65) incPairs
we get the correct result (4,7) (as opposed to (1,8) if lexicographic ordering were used).
This answer is for a more general problem for a unknown predicate. If the predicate is known, more efficient solutions are possible, like others have listed solutions based on knowledge that you don't need to iterate for all Ints for a given c.
When dealing with infinite lists, you need to perform breadth-first search for solution. The list comprehension only affords depth-first search, that is why you never arrive at a solution in your original code.
counters 0 xs = [[]]
counters n xs = concat $ foldr f [] gens where
gens = [[x:t | t <- counters (n-1) xs] | x <- xs]
f ys n = cat ys ([]:n)
cat (y:ys) (x:xs) = (y:x): cat ys xs
cat [] xs = xs
cat xs [] = [xs]
main = print $ take 10 $ filter p $ counters 3 [1..] where
p [a,b,c] = a*a + b*b == c*c
counters generates all possible counters for values from the specified range of digits, including a infinite range.
First, we obtain a list of generators of valid combinations of counters - for each permitted digit, combine it with all permitted combinations for counters of smaller size. This may result in a generator that produces a infinite number of combinations. So, we need to borrow from each generator evenly.
So gens is a list of generators. Think of this as a list of all counters starting with one digit: gens !! 0 is a list of all counters starting with 1, gens !! 1 is a list of all counters starting with 2, etc.
In order to borrow from each generator evenly, we could transpose the list of generators - that way we would get a list of first elements of the generators, followed by a list of second elements of the generators, etc.
Since the list of generators may be infinite, we cannot afford to transpose the list of generators, because we may never get to look at the second element of any generator (for a infinite number of digits we'd have a infinite number of generators). So, we enumerate the elements from the generators "diagonally" - take first element from the first generator; then take the second element from the first generator and the first from the second generator; then take the third element from the first generator, the second from the second, and the first element from the third generator, etc. This can be done by folding the list of generators with a function f, which zips together two lists - one list is the generator, the other is the already-zipped generators -, the beginning of one of them being offset by one step by adding []: to the head. This is almost zipWith (:) ys ([]:n) - the difference is that if n or ys is shorter than the other one, we don't drop the remainder of the other list. Note that folding with zipWith (:) ys n would be a transpose.
For this answer I will take "smallest" to refer to the sum of the numbers in the tuple.
To list all possible pairs in order, you can first list all of the pairs with a sum of 2, then all pairs with a sum of 3 and so on. In code
pairsWithSum n = [(i, n-i) | i <- [1..n-1]]
xs = concatMap pairsWithSum [2..]
Haskell doesn't have facilities for dealing with n-tuples without using Template Haskell, so to generalize this you will have to switch to lists.
ntuplesWithSum 1 s = [[s]]
ntuplesWithSum n s = concatMap (\i -> map (i:) (ntuplesWithSum (n-1) (s-i))) [1..s-n+1]
nums n = concatMap (ntuplesWithSum n) [n..]
Here's another solution, with probably another slightly different idea of "smallest". My order is just "all tuples with max element N come before all tuples with max element N+1". I wrote the versions for pairs and triples:
gen2_step :: Int -> [(Int, Int)]
gen2_step s = [(x, y) | x <- [1..s], y <- [1..s], (x == s || y == s)]
gen2 :: Int -> [(Int, Int)]
gen2 n = concatMap gen2_step [1..n]
gen2inf :: [(Int, Int)]
gen2inf = concatMap gen2_step [1..]
gen3_step :: Int -> [(Int, Int, Int)]
gen3_step s = [(x, y, z) | x <- [1..s], y <- [1..s], z <- [1..s], (x == s || y == s || z == s)]
gen3 :: Int -> [(Int, Int, Int)]
gen3 n = concatMap gen3_step [1..n]
gen3inf :: [(Int, Int, Int)]
gen3inf = concatMap gen3_step [1..]
You can't really generalize it to N-tuples, though as long as you stay homogeneous, you may be able to generalize it if you use arrays. But I don't want to tie my brain into that knot.
I think this is the simplest solution if "smallest" is defined as x+y+z because after you find your first solution in the space of Integral valued pythagorean triangles, your next solutions from the infinite list are bigger.
take 1 [(x,y,z) | y <- [1..], x <- [1..y], z <- [1..x], z*z + x*x == y*y]
-> [(4,5,3)]
It has the nice property that it returns each symmetrically unique solution only once. x and z are also infinite, because y is infinite.
This does not work, because the sequence for x never finishes, and thus you never get a value for y, not to mention z. The rightmost generator is the innermost loop.
take 1 [(z,y,x)|z <- [1..],y <- [1..],x <- [1..],x*x + y*y == z*z]
Sry, it's quite a while since I did haskell, so I'm going to describe it with words.
As I pointed out in my comment. It is not possible to find the smallest anything in an infinite list, since there could always be a smaller one.
What you can do is, have a stream based approach that takes the lists and returns a list with only 'valid' elements, i. e. where the condition is met. Lets call this function triangle
You can then compute the triangle list to some extent with take n (triangle ...) and from this n elements you can find the minium.

Why can't a list be defined like this in Haskell?

[(a,b) | a <- [1..5], b <- [1..5], a+b <- [1..10] ]
Trying to define define a list that follows these rules. I know it doesn't allow the way I am adding a and b but I don't understand why.
Edited forgot the "<-"
Maybe you want this?
[(a,b) | a <- [1..5], b <- [1..5], a + b >= 1 && a + b <= 10]
Or this?
[(a,b) | a <- [1..5], b <- [1..5], a + b `elem` [1..10]]
Haskell doesn't solve equations for you, it performs calculations.
This declares the values which a variable takes:
a <- [1..5]
This is a request for Haskell to solve an equation, which it doesn't do... the left side has to be a valid pattern.
a + b <- [1..10] # Not valid Haskell
Of course, patterns can be more sophisticated,
> [a | Just a <- [Just 10, Nothing, Just 20]]
[10, 20]
The "<-" in a list comprehension actually draws elements from a list.
Your third expression, "a+b <- [1..10]" is really trying to express that the sum could be drawn from a list. That's a job for (elem), a predicate, or test.
elem :: (Eq a) => a -> [a] -> Bool
A pretty good way to think about the problem is, how would it be implemented? You'd have to take elements, then test to see if they met the criteria. I'd use a predicate like
elem (a + b) [1..10]
to test that.

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