Re: [Caml-list] newbie questions

[Wolfgang Lux <wlux@uni-muenster.de>]

Ruediger M.Flaig wrote:

> 1.: Is there any means of doing list-type pattern matching (style "| 
> h::t -> ...") for recursion on strings? OK., I have realized that not 
> having a decent string type is one of the reason why programs in 
> Haskell or Erlang are much slower than in CAML, and resorted to a 
> "roll-your-own" for dealing with this:
>
> let ht x = (String.sub x 1 ((String.length x)-1)), String.make 1 
> (compl x.[0]);;
>
> because I think that
>
> let compl = function 'g' -> 'c' | 'c' -> 'g' | 'a' -> 't' | 't' -> 'a' 
> | _ -> ' ';;
> let rec complement = function
>     "" -> ""
>   | dna -> let h, t = ht dna in (complement h) ^ t;;
>
> is much smarter than the iterative version
>
> let compl = function 'g' -> 'c' | 'c' -> 'g' | 'a' -> 't' | 't' -> 'a' 
> | _ -> ' ';;
> let complement dna =
>   let cdna = ref "" in
>     for i = 0 to String.length( dna )-1 do
>       let cha = String.get dna i in
> 	cdna :=  (String.make 1 (compl cha)) ^ !cdna
>     done;
>     !cdna;;
>
> (Yes! Confess guilty! Learned Pascal in 1986...)
>
> but -- and this is my point -- there should certainly be some more 
> elegant way of dealing with this than the horrible "ht" definition, 
> shouldn't it?

Actually, in many cases you would not want to implement such recursions 
yourself.
Many recursion patterns can implemented by using the standard higher 
order functions
unit, map, fold, etc. For instance, your complement function should be 
as simple as

   let complement dna = String.map compl dna

To my surprise, the String module doesn't provide a map function (it 
does
implement iter, though).

If you were using an algebraic data type

   type Base = A | C | G | T

you could make use of arrays and the implement complement using 
Array.map.

Wolfgang

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