Copyright | [2016..2017] Trevor L. McDonell |
---|---|
License | BSD3 |
Maintainer | Trevor L. McDonell <tmcdonell@cse.unsw.edu.au> |
Stability | experimental |
Portability | non-portable (GHC extensions) |
Safe Haskell | None |
Language | Haskell98 |
Combine folds in Applicative
style to generate multiple results with
a single pass over the array. Based on Max Rabkin's "Beautiful Folding" [1]
and talks by Gabriel Gonzalez [2].
Documentation
Fold
describes how to process data of some i
nput type into some
o
utput type, via a reduction using some intermediate Monoid w
. For
example, both sum
and length
below use the Sum
monoid:
>>>
let sum = Fold (lift . Sum) (getSum . unlift)
>>>
let length = Fold (\_ -> 1) (getSum . unlift)
The key is that Fold
s can be combined using Applicative
in order to
produce multiple outputs from a single reduction of the array. For example:
>>>
let average = (/) <$> sum <*> length
This computes both the sum of the array as well as its length in a single traversal, then combines both results to compute the average.
Because Fold
has some numeric instances, this can also be defined more
succinctly as:
>>>
let average = sum / length
A more complex example:
>>>
let sumOfSquares = Fold (lift . Sum . (^2)) (getSum . unlift)
>>>
let standardDeviation = sqrt ((sumOfSquares / length) - (sum / length) ^ 2)
These will all execute with a single reduction kernel and a single map to summarise (combine) the results.