Formatting a list of strings as a comma-separated string

Question

I'm learning Haskell on my own and I'm following the material of a course.

I would like to know if this is idiomatic Haskell.

asList :: [String] -> String
asList ss = "[" ++ (concat $ intersperse "," ss) ++ "]"

• 200_success: I have arbitrarily chosen one of your four questions. You should ask about the other three functions in separate posts. If you ask about insertBST, you should probably include the corresponding searchBST function in that question too.
• 200_success: The homework tag would instruct reviewers to refrain from giving you complete solutions. Since you have indicated that you are writing code for a self-study course, I have removed the [homework] tag for you.

Answer 1

It looks idiomatic to me.

There's one slight improvement to the code that I could come up with. There is a function that does what you're doing in the middle, called intercalate. Here's the definition, from Data.List:

intercalate :: [a] -> [[a]] -> [a]
intercalate xs xss = concat (intersperse xs xss)

Using that, your function becomes:

asList :: [String] -> String
asList ss = "[" ++ (intercalate "," ss) ++ "]"

• j-a: Beautiful! When I wrote asList, I actually remember seeing intercalate - but did not take the mental leap to consider a a Char. (I considered a as String, in which case it is not as useful).
• j-a: Perhaps - you could include the performance comparison in your answer? It is interesting/useful enough not to be hidden in a comment.

Answer 2

The ++ operator should be used sparingly, and especially avoided after long lists. In this case, the ++ "]" at the end would require walking down nearly the entire constructed string to append the final character.

Here is an implementation that avoids that problem:

asList :: [String] -> String
asList ss = '[' : asList' ss
 where
 asList' (a:b:ss) = a ++ (',' : asList' (b:ss))
 asList' (a:ss) = a ++ asList' (ss)
 asList' [] = "]"

• j-a: OK I see, thanks. To me, this is sacrificing readability for performance - is it common to go to this extent to avoid ++ operator? Or is that only done for performance-critical functions?
• j-a: This was also interesting: stackoverflow.com/questions/5188286/…
• 200_success: I agree that your original code is more readable. In the end, it's up to you to decide whether readability or performance is more important.
• Michael Shaw: I tried this with replicate 50000000 "abc" as input, and on my machine in GHCI using :set +s, the OP's code runs in about 3.5 seconds, and your code runs in about 35 seconds. I tried writing a bit of code that used foldr (:) to avoid the ++ at the end, assuming it would be faster. My code ran in about 4.2 seconds.