[Haskell-beginners] decorate-sort-undecorate in haskell

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Jun 22, 2009, at 06:03 , Ivan Uemlianin wrote:
> I'm learning Haskell from a background in Python, and I'm just  
> looking at the sort and sortBy functions in Data.List.  In Python,  
> the decorate-sort-undecorate pattern is a popular alternative to  
> using an explicit compare function.  For example, to sort a list of  
> lists by

It's fairly common, considering that decorate-sort-undecorate is a  
functional programming idiom dating back to Lisp.  In Haskell it's  
usually expressed with the decoration in a tuple such that the default  
sort can be used.

 > map snd . sort . map (\x -> (x,decorate x))

Fancier versions use arrows to make the decorate part cleaner:

 > map snd . sort . map (decorate &&& id)

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


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