24 Days of GHC Extensions: List Comprehensions

After doing a fantastic job explaining rebindable syntax to us yesterday, Benjamin Kovach has a second post for us today. This time, we’re again going to look at an extension to re-purpose existing Haskell syntax. Ben, it’s over to you!

{-# LANGUAGE ParallelListComp, TransformListComp, MonadComprehensions, RecordWildCards #-} import GHC.Exts import qualified Data.Map as M import Data.Ord (comparing) (comparing)

List Comprehensions are sparsely used in Haskell. Often we opt to instead use Applicative s or Monad s with do notation to construct lists instead. Let’s make them better with some GHC extensions!

ParallelListComp

Let’s look at a simple, normal list comprehension to start:

regularListComp :: [ Int ] = [ x + y * z regularListComp[ x | x <- [ 0 .. 10 ] <- [ 10 .. 20 ] , y <- [ 20 .. 30 ] , z ]

This takes the sum of each element of x paired with each element of y and of z and collects the results. Another useful way to process one ore more lists together is to zip them and process each tuple. This is what ParallelListComprehensions gives us: a list comprehension-like syntax that allows us to process lists in parallel, as if the lists were zipped together and then processed.

parallelListComp :: Int = [ x + y * z parallelListComp[ x | x <- [ 0 .. 10 ] | y <- [ 10 .. 20 ] | z <- [ 20 .. 30 ] ]

This will produce the expression:

zipWith3 (\(x, y, z) -> x + y * z) [ 0 .. 10 ] [ 10 .. 20 ] [ 20 .. 30 ] (\(x, y, z)z) [] [] [

but in a more readable way.

The first example of zip I always think of is the canonical fibonacci list generating function fibs :

fibs :: [ Int ] = 0 : 1 : zipWith ( + ) fibs ( tail fibs) fibs) fibs (fibs)

It’s a really interesting bit of Haskell code that I implore you to investigate if you haven’t! If you look closely, we’re doing a parallel list comprehension here, it’s just recursive. Rewritten with our extension, we get:

fibs :: [ Int ] = 0 : 1 : [ x + y fibs[ x | x <- fibs fibs | y <- tail fibs fibs ]

Which is pretty neat! Further, this is easily extensible. Say we want to express a similar recurrence relation like this:

fiblikes :: [ Int ] = 0 : 1 : [ x + y + z fiblikes[ x | x <- fibs fibs | y <- tail fibs fibs | z <- tail ( tail fibs) fibs) ]

The function this generates looks pretty ugly compared to fibs , but written with ParallelListComprehension syntax, we get something nicer.

TransformListComp

TransformListComp gives us something really powerful and really strange: an SQL-like syntax to process lists as if they were database tables. Let’s construct a simple “table” that we can use to run queries on.

data Character = Character { firstName :: String , lastName :: String , birthYear :: Int } deriving ( Show , Eq ) friends :: [ Character ] = [ Character "Phoebe" "Buffay" 1963 friends , Character "Chandler" "Bing" 1969 , Character "Rachel" "Green" 1969 , Character "Joey" "Tribbiani" 1967 , Character "Monica" "Geller" 1964 , Character "Ross" "Geller" 1966 ]

We can use the fields of Character as we would columns of a database table and process them using TransformListComprehensions . Let’s say we want to collect the names the oldest k friend s from our group. Here’s a function that will do just that (note the use of RecordWildCards !):

oldest :: Int -> [ Character ] -> [ String ] = [ firstName ++ " " ++ lastName oldest k tbl[ firstNamelastName | Character { .. } <- tbl tbl , then sortWith by birthYear sortWith by birthYear , then take k ]

Perhaps we also want to know in which year the most friend s were born, and who they are:

groupByLargest :: Ord b => (a -> b) -> [a] -> [[a]] (ab)[a][[a]] = sortBy (comparing ( negate . length )) . groupWith f groupByLargest fsortBy (comparing ())groupWith f bestBirthYears :: [ Character ] -> [( Int , [ String ])] [(, [])] = [ (the birthYear, firstName) bestBirthYears tbl[ (the birthYear, firstName) | Character { .. } <- tbl tbl , then group by birthYear using groupByLargest by birthYear using groupByLargest ]

It’s kind of wacky, but it works! First we pull out all of the Character s, then we group them together by their birth years. We then sort these grouped lists by their negative length (to get the largest first) and finally return the sorted list of most popular birth years, paired up with the first names of the friends born in those years.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to TransformListComp ; for a more in-depth explanation of how everything works, check out the docs. Onwards!

MonadComprehensions

Recall that the list comprehension:

| a <- xs, b <- ys] [(a, b)xs, bys]

desugars to:

do a <- xs xs b <- ys ys return (a, b) (a, b)

Only, we’re constrained to the [] monad when using list comprehensions. Why not work on an arbitrary monad? That’s exactly what MonadComprehensions allows us to do.

Consider a map of squares to their square roots built using a parallel list comprehension from before:

sqrts :: M.Map Int Int = M.fromList $ [ (x, sx) sqrtsM.fromList[ (x, sx) | x <- map ( ^ 2 ) [ 1 .. 100 ] ) [ | sx <- [ 1 .. 100 ] sx ]

One of the most common things to do with a Map is to lookup a value inside it. In this case, we might want to know if a number is a perfect square, and if so, spit out its square root. Let’s say we want to add two numbers together only if they’re both perfect squares. We could do this using the Monad instance for Maybe , and put it into a list comprehension using MonadComprehensions :

sumIntSqrts :: Int -> Int -> Maybe Int = [ x + y sumIntSqrts a b[ x | x <- M.lookup a sqrts M.lookup a sqrts <- M.lookup b sqrts , yM.lookup b sqrts ]

This is effectively just a different syntax for do notation, since we’re no longer constrained to only lists. For instance, we can even use IO in monad comprehensions:

greet :: IO String = [ name greet[ name | name <- getLine name <- putStrLn $ unwords [ "Hello, " , name, "!" ] , _, name, ]

It should be noted that MonadComprehensions generalize both TransformListComp (guards in comprehensions are translated into the guard function if your monad is a MonadPlus ) and ParallelListComp (parallel statements are translated into mzip expressions). You can read about the actual transformations that take place here.

This post is part of 24 Days of GHC Extensions - for more posts like this, check out the calendar.