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listprologmaplist

Prolog: Maplist appending results to main list instead of sublists

So I have the simple predicate defined as

pred(Info, List, Result) :-
  maplist(pred_calculate(Info), List, Result).

pred_calculate returns a list of X elements after an operation on a element of list, so for example pred_calculate(Info, List, Result) would return something like [2,3,5]

I want to add all the results of applying the pred_calculate predicate to all the elements of List, the problem I'm running into is that at the moment it's adding all the results from pred_calculate as sublists instead of adding to the single main list only.

So at the moment Result returns [[2,3,5],[5,7,8],[8,9,11]] when it should return only [2,3,5,5,7,8,8,9,11]

How would I go about changing it to fix this behaviour?

Solution

  • When using foldl/4 with append/3, you have to pass the arguments in the correct order to append, if the order of the items is important1:

    pred(Info, List, Result) :-
    maplist(pred_calculate(Info), List, List1),
    foldl([A, B, C] >> append(B, A, C), List1, [], Result).

    Also, flatten/2 would achieve the same result, i.e.:

    pred(Info, List, Result) :-
    maplist(pred_calculate(Info), List, List1),
    flatten(List1, Result).

    1: foldl(append, List1, [], Result) would give you [8,9,11,5,7,8,2,3,5] as result.