[erlang-questions] Generators?
tsuraan
tsuraan@REDACTED
Mon Jul 30 16:56:59 CEST 2007
While reading the Erlang and Neural Networks paper, I noticed that the
created dot product function was (in my eye) not a terribly good example of
functional programming. A more "functional style" would be something like:
dot_prod(L1, L2) -> lists:sum(lists:zipwith(fun(X,Y) -> X*Y end, L1, L2)).
So we're basically mapping a function across a pair of lists, and then
summing it. This looks pretty inefficient though; I don't think you can do
any better than the function given in the paper, so I'm just
trying to satisfy my curiosity here. The most offensive thing that I see
about my function is that it creates a temporary list of products, and then
sums that. If L1 and L2 are large, itwill also create a large temporary
list that is a total waste. In python, you could write a zipwith function
as a generator that yields values as they are requested. Any standard
function that takes a list will also take a generator because they both just
expose the looping interface (__iter__). Is it possible to create a
generator function in erlang that can be used with the list functions?
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