Functional programming is becoming increasingly widespread in industry. This trend is driven by the adoption of Scala as the main programming language for many applications. Scala fuses functional and object-oriented programming in a practical package. It interoperates seamlessly with both Java and Javascript. Scala is the implementation language of many important frameworks, including Apache Spark, Kafka, and Akka. It provides the core infrastructure for sites such as Twitter, Tumblr and also Coursera. In this course you will discover the elements of the functional programming style and learn how to apply them usefully in your daily programming tasks. You will also develop a solid foundation for reasoning about functional programs, by touching upon proofs of invariants and the tracing of execution symbolically. The course is hands on; most units introduce short programs that serve as illustrations of important concepts and invite you to play with them, modifying and improving them. The course is complemented by a series programming projects as homework assignments. Recommended background: You should have at least one year programming experience. Proficiency with Java or C# is ideal, but experience with other languages such as C/C++, Python, Javascript or Ruby is also sufficient. You should have some familiarity using the command line.
Lecture 4.7 - Lists
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From the course by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Functional Programming Principles in Scala
6088 ratings
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
6088 ratings
Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Functional Programming in Scala
From the lesson
Types and Pattern Matching
This week we'll learn about the relationship between functions and objects in Scala; functions *are* objects! We'll zoom in on Scala's type system, covering subtyping and generics, and moving on to more advanced aspects of Scala's type system like variance. Finally, we'll cover Scala's most widely used data structure, Lists, and one of Scala's most powerful tools, pattern matching.
Meet the Instructors
Martin OderskyProfessor
Computer Science
In the next series of lectures, we'll take a close look at collections, in
particular, immutable collections that are used in purely functional programs.
An important tool in the functional programs was tool box, because they enable
the expression of algorithms in a very high level and concise way that, in
addition, has a high chance of being correct.
In this session, we'll start with lists. You've already seen lists as a fundamental
data structure last week, where we discussed the core concepts.
In this week, now we are going to show you how lists are defined in this Scala
standard library, and what kind of operations they support.
So let's see how lists are defined in the Standard Library and what you can do with
them. First, to construct the list having
elements X1 to Xn you simply write list and the elements in parentheses.
So here you see some examples. A list of fruit consisting of apples,
oranges, and pears. A list of numbers consisting of the
numbers one, to four. And here's the diagonal of a three by
three matrix represented as a list, Of lists.
And finally, the last example is the empty list, which is simply return list of open
parens, close parens. Lists are sequences just like arrays are,
and you might know arrays from Java or C but there are two important differences.
The first is that lists are immutable, so you can't change an element of a list.
And the second is that lists are recursive, while arrays are flat.
In fact, you see the lists you see in the Scala standard library, are very much like
the lists that we have constructed from scratch over the last week.
The basic construction is exactly the same.
The data structures are the same but the lists in the Scala library carry many more
operations that you can do with them. And in the, in this session and the next,
we are going to find out what these operations are.
So just as a reminder concerning the structures of lists.
So if you have a list of apples, oranges, and pears, then that would be represented
as a list of cells, where the first cell would be apples, the second cell would
contain, as its' had, oranges. The third one would be pears.
And right end part of the last console is the empty list Nil.
To look at diagonals, so that will be a bit more complicated.
So there we would have as a first element a list which is one, zero, zero, and Nil.
As a second element we would have the list which is zero one zero.
As a third element, and we would have the list, which is zero, zero one and all
these three elements are combined in a list, so it would look like this.
So, let's have a quick look at the list types.
It is essentially the same as what we have constructed last week.
So, a list with string element is written as list of string, a parametrized type.
So, fruit would be a list of string, numbers would be a list of int, diagonal
three would be a list of list of int. And finally, empty would be a list of
nothing. A list that does not contain elements and is therefore a list of the
bottom type, of as, as element type. Now we've seen lists constructed
homogeneously, refer it in list and just all the elements in the list but in fact,
that's syntactic sugar for something more fundamental.
All lists in Scala are constructed from the empty list Nil and the construction
operation, which is written as a double, double point and is pronounced Cons.
So the operation x cons xs gives you a new list with the first element x and it's
followed by the elements of xs. So that means that our previous, lists of fruit
and numbers and empty can also be written like this.
So fruit would be apples, corns, a list oranges, corns, a list pears and then nil.
That corresponds exactly to what we've drawn in the slide before.
Numbers then would be similarly and finally empty.
The empty list would just be nil. So again note the similarity of what we've
done last week with our simple list hierarchy.
It's just where we were writing new cons x xs.
Now we write simply, x :: xs. In fact, there's a convention for Scala
syntax which makes the cons operation look nicer.
We have the universal convention that all operators that end in a colon associate to
the right. Whereas all other operators would
associate to the left, as usual. So that means that if you have two double
colons like here A :: B :: C then that's really interpreted as A :: and then B :: C
so the parentheses go to the right. And that means when you write a list like
this, you can omit the parentheses because that would be redundant.
So this list really means the same as what we've drawn before with parenthesis going
here, Like that.
The second difference concerning operators that end in colon.
Concerns that raise their scene of method calls.
In fact an operand that ends in a call is seen as a method call of its right hand
operand. Remember all other in fix operators are
seen as method calls on the left hand operands.
So the left hand operand was the receiver. For operaators ending in a colon, this is
reversed, so it's the right hand operand. And that makes a lot of sense, because it
means that an expression like this will really be expanded by the compiler to this
sequence of method courts. So it's Nil followed by the colon
operation, that's a method colon Nil and we pass four as the argument to it.
Then we have another colon method, colon we pass three, then we have another one
and we pass two, and finally, we pass one. So each application of the double colon
cons operation pre-pens the argument to the list that was constructed so far.
So, double colon is really with this convention, the same as the preprened
operation we defined last week. You also know from last week that there
are three fundamental operations on lists. And that all other operations can be
expressed in terms of these three. They are, isEmpty which finds out whether
a list is empty. It returns true if it's empty, false
otherwise. Head, which returns the first element of
the list. Exception if the list is empty. Tail which returns the list compose of all
the elements except the first. So these operations are as you've seen
last week defined as methods on objects of type list.
So for instance you would write fruit.head and get apple or you would write
fruit.tail.head and get oranges. The second element in the fruit list.
If you take the diagonal of size three then its head element would be the first
row. So that would be the list of one, zero,
zero. And if you take head of the empty list,
then you would get an exception. A no such element exception which would
tell you that you have tried to take the head of the empty list.
Its also possible and in fact, often preferred, to decompose lists with pattern
matching. The patterns that you can apply to lists
are exactly the same as the construction methods of lists.
So there will be a middle pattern that corresponds to the middle constant,
there's a cons pattern that has a pattern. And in front of the double colon and the
pattern afterwards. And the idea of that would be that this
pattern matches any list whose head matches P and whose tail matches the
second pattern, PS. And finally there is a short hand list of
P1 to PN, and that's, as usual, the same as the pattern P1 cons P2 and so on cons
PN, and finally, a nil at the end. So, let's see some examples.
The first pattern here would match lists whose first element is a one.
The second element is a two and the rest of the list is arbitrary and is bound to
the variable xs. The second paren.
Here would match lists of length one. And the first element can be arbitrary and
is bound to the variable x. The pattern list of x is exactly the same
as x cons nil. So again, it's lists of length one whose
element is bound to the variable x. The list of open parens., closed parens.,
that's the empty list, the same as nil. And the paren.
List of two colon xs, what would that be? While that would match a list with a
single element which is another list that starts with two and whose tail is bound to
the variable xs. So let's do an exercise.
Consider this list pattern here x cons y cons list xs, ys, cons zs.
What is the condition that describes most accurately the length l of the list it
matches? Does it match lists of length three or
four or five? Or any list that, whose length is greater
or equal to three or greater or equal to four or greater or equal to five?
Well, let's have a look at the pattern again.
So. What we see here is a list of three
elements, the first named x the second named Y, the third is a list by itself.
And then, the rest of the list is captured by the variable zs so that means that the
list. Must have a length that is greater or
equal to three. The variable zed s might be empty, nil, in
which case the list would have a length of exactly three or it might be non-empty in
which case the length of the list would be greater than three.
So in any case the condition that we're looking for would be length greater or =
three. As another example let's suppose we want
to sort a list of numbers in ascending order.
In fact the standard class list in, in the Scala library has a sort function but
let's pretend it hasn't and we have to do it ourselves.
So one way to sort the list say, list of 7392 would be to sort the tail of the
list. 392 sorted would give us list of 239, and
then to insert the head of the list at the right place.
At the right place means that, the, it, it, all elements that precede the inserted
elements are smaller or equal, and all elements that follow are larger or equal.
That idea is insertion sort. So.
We would write it as follows. We would say, well, we have a function I
sort for insertion sort. It takes a list of ints, it gives us back
a list of ints which is the sorted version of xs.
And we would say, okay, if xs is the empty list, then, let's return the empty list.
If xs is a list that consists of at least one element, call that y, and arrest ys.
Then, what we would do is, we would sort recursively the rest, the tail, YS and we
would insert Y into the tail. What you've seen here is by far the most
standard way to decompose a list. You would typically ask first, is the list
empty, and if it's not empty, you would ask, well, what is its head and what is
its tail? And all of these questions are expressed
in the two patterns list of open parens, close parens and the cons pattern that you
see here. So the definition of insertion sort is not
quite done yet because we still have to define the function Insert, that inserts
an element x at the right place of a list x-s which is already sorted.
I'll leave that to you as an exercise. As a hint, we would apply the same
decomposition of lists that we've seen before.
The standard decomposition into a case where the list is empty, and where it's a
cons of a heads and a tail. So all that remains is fill in the triple
question marks here. Once you've done that, I'd like you to
answer the following question. What is the worst case complexity of
insertion sort relative to the length of the input list N?
What I mean by that is what is the number of steps insertion sort performs in our
substitution model as a function of the length of the input list N.
Does sort always take the same amount of time no matter how large N is?
So we would say that sort takes constant time or does sort take a number of steps
that's proportional to the input list N? Or is it maybe proportional to N times
logarithm of N or proportional to N squared?
So lets see how we would answer this. Lets first fill in the insert function.
So inserting an element in an empty list. What would we expect to get back?
Well, that would be the list that contains just the element to be inserted.
Inserting X in a non-empty list, well there would two cases.
The first case would be that the. Element to be inserted is, in fact, less
than or equal to the first element to the list.
In that case, we can simply give you X followed by XS.
So we know that the element X will be the head element of the new list.
Otherwise. What do we need to do?
Well, the first element of our list in the other case where x is greater than y,
would be y, because that's the smallest element of all the elements that we've
seen. And that would be followed by.
Now what we need to do is we need to have a call of insert of x into the remainder
of the list, into y s. So lets look at the complexity.
Now, looking alone at insert first, we see that worst case would be that the element
X is greater than all the elements of the lists.
In which case, we would need N recursive calls for the insert functions.
So the number of steps of insert would be proportional to N where N is the length of
the list. Going back to insertion sort here.
We ask ourselves how many calls to insert would be expect for list of length N.
Well the answer is there would be one call for each element that we have in the list.
So that would be another factor of N. So what we would get at the end is that
the complexity of insert is proportional to N squared.
Which is actually not a good. So we will see in a couple of sessions
another way to sort lists whose complexity is better.
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