Did you ever hear something about functional programming? I'm sure you did, and if you didn't you should check it out.
In one sentence it is basically a more mathematical approach to programming...but extremely efficient.
Consider
for instance the following lines of code:
f[] = []
f(x:xs) = f ys ++ [x] ++ f zs
where
ys = [a | a <- xs, a <= x]
zs = [b | b <- xs, b > x]
Did
you understand what it does?? It's the quicksort algorithm, expressed in just 5 lines. Initially it may look quite
strange, but actually it is very intuitive. For instance in the first line f[] = [] is the definition of the recursive
"basic" condition, what follows is the recursive call itself. The function accepts a list (x:xs), an x followed by many
xs :) . The part f ys ++ [x] ++ f zs basically says that you take the "x" in the middle and you add ys before and zs
after. Note this are the recursive calls on the function f. ys and zs are defined below, where ys is a list with
elements "a" which will take values from the xs if a <= x. Essentially in ys all elements will be added which are
before (less than) x. The contrary holds for the zs. And so you get the sorted list.
*Main> f [2, 4, 11, 4, 2, 18,5, 3]
[2,2,3,4,4,5,11,18]
Functional
programming is extremely efficient. There exist a bunch of libraries which are written in functional programming
languages. Even Microsoft added functional programming style pieces into C#, the
C#
lambda expressions which are very handy especially for dealing with lists (sorting, filtering etc...).
Resources:Haskell in 10 minutes
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