Question

I am currently doing reasonably well in functional programming using F#. I tend, however, to do a lot of programming using recursion, when it seems that there are better idioms in the F#/functional programming community. So in the spirit of learning, is there a better/more idiomatic way of writing the function below without recursion?

let rec convert line =
    if line.[0..1] = "  " then
        match convert line.[2..] with
        | (i, subline) -> (i+1, subline)
    else
        (0, line)

with results such as:

> convert "asdf";;
val it : int * string = (0, "asdf")
> convert "  asdf";;
val it : int * string = (1, "asdf")
> convert "      asdf";;
val it : int * string = (3, "asdf")

Answer 1

Recursion is the basic mechanism for writing loops in functional languages, so if you need to iterate over characters (as you do in your sample), then recursion is what you need.

If you want to improve your code, then you should probably avoid using line.[2..] because that is going to be inefficient (strings are not designed for this kind of processing). It is better to convert the string to a list and then process it:

let convert (line:string) = 
  let rec loop acc line =
    match line with
    | ' '::' '::rest -> loop (acc + 1) rest
    | _ -> (acc, line)
  loop 0 (List.ofSeq line)

You can use various functions from the standard library to implement this in a more shorter way, but they are usually recursive too (you just do not see the recursion!), so I think using functions like Seq.unfold and Seq.fold is still recursive (and it looks way more complex than your code).

A more concise approach using standard libraries is to use the TrimLeft method (see comments), or using standard F# library functions, do something like this:

let convert (line:string) =
  // Count the number of spaces at the beginning
  let spaces = line |> Seq.takeWhile (fun c -> c = ' ') |> Seq.length
  // Divide by two - we want to count & skip two-spaces only
  let count = spaces / 2
  // Get substring starting after all removed two-spaces
  count, line.[(count * 2) ..]

EDIT Regarding the performance of string vs. list processing, the problem is that slicing allocates a new string (because that is how strings are represented on the .NET platform), while slicing a list just changes a reference. Here is a simple test:

let rec countList n s = 
  match s with 
  | x::xs -> countList (n + 1) xs
  | _ -> n

let rec countString n (s:string) =
  if s.Length = 0 then n
  else countString (n + 1) (s.[1 ..])


let l = [ for i in 1 .. 10000 -> 'x' ]
let s = new System.String('x', 10000)

#time 
for i in 0 .. 100 do countList 0 l |> ignore    // 0.002 sec (on my machine)
for i in 0 .. 100 do countString 0 s |> ignore  // 5.720 sec (on my machine)