List Ops

Instructions

Implement basic list operations.

In functional languages list operations like length, map, and reduce are very common. Implement a series of basic list operations, without using existing functions.

The precise number and names of the operations to be implemented will be track dependent to avoid conflicts with existing names, but the general operations you will implement include:

• append (given two lists, add all items in the second list to the end of the first list);
• concatenate (given a series of lists, combine all items in all lists into one flattened list);
• filter (given a predicate and a list, return the list of all items for which predicate(item) is True);
• length (given a list, return the total number of items within it);
• map (given a function and a list, return the list of the results of applying function(item) on all items);
• foldl (given a function, a list, and initial accumulator, fold (reduce) each item into the accumulator from the left);
• foldr (given a function, a list, and an initial accumulator, fold (reduce) each item into the accumulator from the right);
• reverse (given a list, return a list with all the original items, but in reversed order).

Note, the ordering in which arguments are passed to the fold functions (foldl, foldr) is significant.

Library of Functions

This is the first exercise we've seen where the solution we're writing is not a "main" script. We're writing a library to be "source"d into other scripts that will invoke our functions.

Bash namerefs

This exercise requires the use of nameref variables. This requires a bash version of at least 4.0. If you're using the default bash on MacOS, you'll need to install another version: see Installing Bash

Namerefs are a way to pass a variable to a function by reference. That way, the variable can be modified in the function and the updated value is available in the calling scope. Here's an example:

prependElements() {
    local -n __array=$1
    shift
    __array=( "$@" "${__array[@]}" )
}

my_array=( a b c )
echo "before: ${my_array[*]}"    # => before: a b c

prependElements my_array d e f
echo "after: ${my_array[*]}"     # => after: d e f a b c