I have some difficulties to transfer imperative algorithms into a functional style. The main concept that I cannot wrap my head around is how to fill sequences with values according to their position in the sequence. How would an idiomatic solution for the following algorithm look in Haskell?
A = unsigned char[256]
idx <- 1
for(i = 0 to 255)
if (some_condition(i))
A[i] <- idx
idx++
else
A[i] = 0;
The algorithm basically creates a lookup table for the mapping function of a histogram.
Do you know any resources which would help me to understand this kind of problem better?
One of the core ideas in functional programming is to express algorithms as data transformations. In a lazy language like Haskell, we can even go a step further and think of lazy data structures as reified computations. In a very real sense, Haskell's lists are more like loops than normal linked lists: they can be calculated incrementally and don't have to exist in memory all at once. At the same time, we still get many of the advantages of having a data type like that ability to pass it around and inspect it with pattern matching.
With this in mind, the "trick" for expressing a for-loop with an index is to create a list of all the values it can take. Your example is probably the simplest case: i takes all the values from 0 to 255, so we can use Haskell's built-in notation for ranges:
[0..255]
At a high level, this is Haskell's equivalent of for (i = 0 to 255); we can then execute the actual logic in the loop by traversing this list either by a recursive function or a higher-order function from the standard library. (The second option is highly preferred.)
This particular logic is a good fit for a fold. A fold lets us take in a list item by item and build up a result of some sort. At each step, we get a list item and the value of our built-up result so far. In this particular case, we want to process the list from left to right while incrementing an index, so we can use foldl; the one tricky part is that it will produce the list backwards.
Here's the type of foldl:
foldl :: (b -> a -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b
So our function takes in our intermediate value and a list element and produces an updated intermediate value. Since we're constructing a list and keeping track of an index, our intermediate value will be a pair that contains both. Then, once we have the final result, we can ignore the idx value and reverse the final list we get:
a = let (result, _) = foldl step ([], 1) [0..255] in reverse result
where step (a, idx) i
| someCondition i = (idx:a, idx + 1)
| otherwise = (0:a, idx)
In fact, the pattern of transforming a list while keeping track of some intermediate state (idx in this case) is common enough so that it has a function of its own in terms of the State type. The core abstraction is a bit more involved (read through ["You Could Have Invented Monads"][you] for a great introduction), but the resulting code is actually quite pleasant to read (except for the imports, I guess :P):
import Control.Applicative
import Control.Monad
import Control.Monad.State
a = evalState (mapM step [0..255]) 1
where step i
| someCondition i = get <* modify (+ 1)
| otherwise = return 0
The idea is that we map over [0..255] while keeping track of some state (the value of idx) in the background. evalState is how we put all the plumbing together and just get our final result. The step function is applied to each input list element and can also access or modify the state.
The first case of the step function is interesting. The <* operator tells it to do the thing on the left first, the thing on the right second but return the value on the left. This lets us get the current state, increment it but still return the value we got before it was incremented. The fact that our notion of state is a first-class entity and we can have library functions like <* is very powerful—I've found this particular idiom really useful for traversing trees, and other similar idioms have been quite useful for other code.