Question

I have a help function in my Ocaml project that helps to append a list to another without element duplicate.
For example, append list x: [d, e, f, g] to list y [a, b, c, d], result should be [a, b, c, d, e, f, g]

The function I wrote is like this:

    (* helper function checks if list contains element *)
let rec find e l =
    match l with
        [] -> false
        |(h::t) -> if (h = e) then true else find e t
;;

    (* helper function append l1 to l2 without duplicate *)
let rec help_append_list l1 l2 =
    match l1 with
        [] -> l2
        |(h::t) -> if (find h l2 = false) then (help_append_list t ([h]@l2)) else (help_append_list t l2)
;;

But this dosen’t look like working well when I use it, it turns out to be there’s still duplicate elements appear.

Please take a look at the above functions and give me some suggestion on how to correct them…

Thank you=)

Answer 1

If you use Set, you only need union of two sets for the purpose.

If l2 in help_append_list doesn’t have duplication, your function works fine.

Suppose that x and y could have their own duplication, and the order doesn’t matter, you could use:

let append_list x y = help_append_list x (help_append_list y [])

I have some comments on your functions. First, find is the same as exists function in List module. You probably want to write it for learning purpose, so if (h = e) then true else ... should be replaced by ||:

let rec find e = function
    | [] -> false
    | h::t -> h = e || find e t

Second, [h]@l2 is an inefficient way to write h::l2:

let rec help_append_list l1 l2 =
    match l1 with
    | [] -> l2
    | h::t -> if find h l2 then help_append_list t l2
              else help_append_list t (h::l2)