I have a F# query that returns seq<float>.
I was wondering how I could stuff the data within the seq<float> in a ILNumerics dense array (http://ilnumerics.net/FunctionRules.html) using an F# idiomatic functional style.
The data in the seq may correspond to a row, a column or the entire dense array.
References to F# code are also welcome.
Looking at the C# example on this page, something like this should work
let toILNUM input = array(input |> Seq.toArray)
Related
In F# we have List.partition and Array.partition which return a tuple of lists and a tuple of arrays respectively.
so, why is there no Seq.partition returning a tuple of sequences?
here is a very simple implementation:
F# Snippets
so... why isn't this part of the core?
In F# 4.0 (Visual Studio 2015), the core libraries are a lot more uniform than before, but they still do not come with an implementation of Seq.partition. You can find more about this in the F# language design discussion: Regular functional operators producing two or more output collections.
The summary is that the Seq.partition function is quite tricky and a having it could introduce potential performance issues. There a couple of ways it can work:
It can iterate over the input collection twice (like the FsSnip version), which can cause issues if you have complex delayed computation (you're doing everything twice)
It can iterate over the input once, but then it would have to do some complex mutable state sharing (which could secretly allocate memory).
So, Seq.partition cannot be implemented reasonably while keeping all the good properties that you would expect about the seq<'T> type.
Seq.partition is just a specialized version of Seq.groupBy, so the standard library could implement the former as a wrapper around the latter without introducing any new issues.
let partition predicate source =
let map =
source
|> Seq.groupBy predicate
|> Map.ofSeq
let get flag =
map
|> Map.tryFind flag
|> Option.defaultValue Seq.empty
get true, get false
There is need for tracing. The decorator should print function name, parameters values and return value. Instead of writing each time a decorator for each function, it would be terrific if it could be possible to do this programmatically.
The current function name can be discovered using reflection via MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod. Functions could be easily decorated with an inline function for logging:
let inline log args f =
let mi = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod()
let result = f ()
printf "%s %A -> %A" mi.Name args result
let add a b = log (a,b) (fun () -> a + b)
add 1 1
Which prints: add (1, 1) -> 2
EDIT: Another option would be to create a wrap function, i.e.:
let inline wrap f =
fun ps ->
let result = f args
printfn "%A -> %A" args result
result
let add (a,b) = a + b
wrap add (1,1)
However in this case there is not an easy way to programmatically retrieve the function name.
Yet another option might be to develop a Type Provider that takes an assembly path as a parameter and provides wrapped versions of all members.
I had the same desire previously and found that there are no current automated solutions for F#.
See: Converting OCaml to F#: Is there a simple way to simulate OCaml top-level #trace in F#
While OCaml's trace facility with time travel is the most useful debugging feature of comparison to what is desired, it is not an exact fit; but when I use OCaml it is the first inspection tool I use.
See: Using PostSharp with F# - Need documentation with working example
Also the suggestion of using AOP, i.e. PostSharp, was another good suggestion, as the response from Gael Fraiteur, the Principal Engineer of PostSharp points out:
PostSharp does not officially support F#.
Other than using reflection as suggested by Phillip Trelford, which I have not tried, the best solution I have found is to manually modify each function to be traced as I noted in Converting OCaml to F#: Is there a simple way to simulate OCaml top-level #trace in F# and save the results to a separate log file using NLog.
See: Using NLog with F# Interactive in Visual Studio - Need documentation
Another route to pursue would be check out the work of F# on Mono as there is a lot of work being done there to add extra tooling for use with F#.
Basically what I have found is that as my F# skills increase my need
to use a debugger or tracing decrease.
At present when I do run into a problem needing this level of inspection, adding the inspection code as noted in Converting OCaml to F#: Is there a simple way to simulate OCaml top-level #trace in F# helps to resolve my misunderstanding.
Also of note is that people who come from the C# world to the F# world tend to expect a debugger to be just as useful. Remember that imperative languages tend to be about manipulating data held in variables and that the debugger is used to inspect the values in these variables, while with functional programming, at least for me, I try to avoid mutable values and so the only values one needs to inspect are the values being passed to the function and no other values, thus reducing or obviating the need for a debugger or inspection beyond that of the function of question.
Following this from the Real-World Functional Programming blog about drawing bar and column charts, I was trying to draw a histogram for my data which is stored at a set of tuples (data_value, frequency) in a lazy sequence.
It does not work unless I convert the sequence into a List, the error message being that in case of sequence "the IEnumerable 'T does not support the Reset function". Is there any way to generate a histogram/chart etc. using the .NET library from a lazily-evaluated sequence?
Also (ok newbie query alert), is there any way to make the chart persist when the program is run from the console? The usual System.Console.ReadKey() |> ignore makes the chart window hang, and otherwise it disappears in an instant. I've been using "Send to Interactive" to see results til now.
The problem is that sequences (of type seq<T>, which is just an alias for IEnumerable<T>) generated using the F# sequence expression notation do not support the Reset method. The method is required by the charting library (because it needs to obtain the data each time it redraws the screen).
This means that, for example, the following will not work:
seq { for x in data -> x } |> FSharpChart.Line
Many of the standard library functions from the Seq module are implemented using sequence expressions, so the result will not support Reset. You can fix that by converting the data to a list (using List.ofSeq) or to an array (using Array.ofSeq) or by writing the code using lists:
[ for x in data -> x ] |> FSharpChart.Line
... and if you're using some function, you can take the one from List (not all of the Seq functions are available for List, so sometimes you will need to use conversion):
[ for x in data -> x ] |> List.choose op |> FSharpChart.Line
No, it does not accept sequences.
That said, there is a good reason for not supporting seq. it is about the structure itself : A seq is just that, a seq, and therefore does not and should not, support the kind of operations needed in drawing a graph. That said, I really wish this stack was more advanced and supported more use style.
So the answer is to
|> Seq.toArray
or
|> Seq.toList
before sending to the chart library
I am trying to define Bill Of Materials kind of queries using the recently introduced F# 3.0 query comprehension syntax. Though it is possible to define these kind of queries using yield! seq comprehensions for in-memory collections I had no lack in translating those into query comprehensions that target remotable IQueryable sources. I guess the hard part would be to "train" the provider into recognizing Common Table Expressions out of recursive patterns.
Any ideas?
Unfortunately, I don't think that the current query syntax support in F# 3.0 is capable of dealing with recursive queries. The main problem is that F# 3.0 relies on standard IQueryable implementations that were designed mainly for C# and so they do not expect recursive structures.
I think that supporting this would be quite difficult. You could either implement your own F# quotations to SQL translator (which is hard) or you could implement some sort of pre-processor that takes an F# quotation (query) that contains recursion and translates the recursion to something that the LINQ to SQL translator can deal with (but this is probably hard too).
In general, the approach would be to define your own query builder:
open System.IO
open Microsoft.FSharp.Quotations
type MyQueryBuilder() =
member x.For(a, body) = Seq.collect body a
member x.Quote(e) = e
member x.YieldFrom(s) = s
member x.Run(e:Expr<'T>) : 'T = failwithf "%A" e
// Example using the custom query builder
// (fails, printing the quoted query)
let mquery = MyQueryBuilder()
let n = [1 .. 10]
let rec nums a : seq<int> =
mquery { for b in n do
yield! nums b }
In the Run method, you get a quotation that represents the query. You could pre-process that and replace all calls to MyQueryBuilder with calls to standard query operations and replace recursion with something else. Then you could call query.Run (to run the standard IQueryable implementation).
Though as I said, this is probably going to be quite difficult to implement - but perhaps, if you have some specific kind of recursion that you can easily deal with, it might be an option. However, if LINQ to SQL does not generate Common Table Expressions for any standard patterns, then I don't think you can train it to generate them - as far as I know, the translator is not really extensible.
I use F# a lot. All the basic collections in F# implement IEumberable interface, thus it is quite natural to access them using the single Seq module in F#. Is this possible in OCaml?
The other question is that 'a seq in F# is lazy, e.g. I can create a sequence from 1 to 100 using {1..100} or more verbosely:
seq { for i=1 to 100 do yield i }
In OCaml, I find myself using the following two methods to work around with this feature:
generate a list:
let rec range a b =
if a > b then []
else a :: range (a+1) b;;
or resort to explicit recursive functions.
The first generates extra lists. The second breaks the abstraction as I need to operate on the sequence level using higher order functions such as map and fold.
I know that the OCaml library has Stream module. But the functionality of it seems to be quite limited, not as general as 'a seq in F#.
BTW, I am playing Project Euler problems using OCaml recently. So there are quite a few sequences operations, that in an imperative language would be loops with a complex body.
This Ocaml library seems to offer what you are asking. I've not used it though.
http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
Checkout this module, Enum
http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/doc.preview:batteries-beta1/html/api/Enum.html
I somehow feel Enum is a much better name than Seq. It eliminates the lowercase/uppercase confusion on Seqs.
An enumerator, seen from a functional programming angle, is exactly a fold function. Where a class would implement an Enumerable interface in an object-oriented data structures library, a type comes with a fold function in a functional data structure library.
Stream is a slightly quirky imperative lazy list (imperative in that reading an element is destructive). CamlP5 comes with a functional lazy list library, Fstream. This already cited thread offers some alternatives.
It seems you are looking for something like Lazy lists.
Check out this SO question
The Batteries library mentioned also provides the (--) operator:
# 1 -- 100;;
- : int BatEnum.t = <abstr>
The enum is not evaluated until you traverse the items, so it provides a feature similar to your second request. Just beware that Batteries' enums are mutable. Ideally, there would also be a lazy list implementation that all data structures could be converted to/from, but that work has not been done yet.