Mateu

By using the the grep function in Perl, one can pick elements from a list that match a certain condition. Haskell uses the filter function to do the same work.

Perl Example

One way to use grep in Perl is:

my @people          = qw/Kim Jim Jane Blane Tim/;
my $predicate       = sub { shift =~ m/im$/ };
my @filtered_people = grep $predicate->($_), @people;

1. Define a list of people
2. Create a predicate¹, as a code reference
3. apply grep to the predicate and people list

A predicate expression is applied to each person in the list. The filtered list is all the elements that cause the expression to evaluate to true. Here the predicate returns true when a name ends with 'im'.

It's common in Perl to use a block instead of an expression with grep. This allows one to inline the test:

my @filtered_people = grep { m/im$/ } @people

Haskell Example

In Haskell one can use filter like so:

import Data.List (isSuffixOf)
people =  ["Kay", "Jed", "Ned", "Jay", "Ray"]
predicate :: String -> Bool
predicate xs = "ay" `isSuffixOf` xs
filteredPeople = filter predicate people

1. import isSuffixOf function from the Data.List module
2. Define a list of people
3. Define the type signature of the predicate
4. Define the value constructor for the predicate
5. apply filter to a predicate and the list of people

We could combine the last three lines into one using a lambda function:

filteredPeople = filter (\xs -> "ay" `isSuffixOf` xs) people

Lambda functions are similar to anonymous subroutines in Perl.

¹ The function that determines if a condition is met is commonly called a predicate.