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.

The test cases may look confusing. You are expected to implement this:

set myList {alpha beta gamma delta}
listOps::filter $myList {{word} {expr {[string length $word] == 4}}

Why does that last argument have so many braces?

Recall that the proc command is defined as:

proc procName argList body

Tcl has an apply command:

apply func ?arg1 arg2 ...?

this "func" is a two element list {argList body} that is essentially an anonymous proc (or "lambda"). The apply command invokes that anonymous proc, passing it the arguments it needs.

As an example, these are equivalent:

# using proc
proc myReverse {str} {return [string reverse $str]}
puts [myReverse "Hello, World!"]

# using apply
puts [apply {{str} {string reverse $str}} "Hello, World!"]

# or, store the func in a variable
set func {{str} {string reverse $str}}
puts [apply $func "Hello, World!"]

Using apply makes it simpler to pass around blocks of code.

Ref: apply, proc.