I'm calculating the sum of a list after applying someFunction to every element of it like so:
sum (map someFunction myList)
someFunction is very resource heavy so to optimise it I want to stop calculating the sum if it goes above a certain threshold.
It seems like I need to use fold but I don't know how to break out if it if the accumulator reaches the threshold. My guess is to somehow compose fold and takeWhile but I'm not exactly sure how.
One of the options would be using scanl function, which returns a list of intermediate calculations of foldl.
Thus, scanl1 (+) (map someFunction myList) will return the intermediate sums of your calculations. And since Haskell is a lazy language it won't calculate all the values of myList until you need it. For example:
take 5 $ scanl1 (+) (map someFunction myList)
will calculate someFunction 5 times and return the list of these 5 results.
After that you can use either takeWhile or dropWhile and stop the calculation, when a certain condition is True. For example:
head $ dropWhile (< 1000) $ scanl1 (+) [1..1000000000]
will stop the calculation, when sum of the numbers reaches 1000 and returns 1035.