[plt-scheme] help on how to write a frequency-counting function in a more functional way

Oh, yes -- sorry that's the best if you know that the data is dense in
a particular range of values (and that range isn't huge).

Robby

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> Frequencies come in ranges and my guess is that you have the full range of
> them.
> If so, I would have no hesitations giving up pure FP and use a vector in the
> proper range. I doubt very much any FP technique comes close in efficiency.
> -- Matthias
>
>
> On Apr 18, 2009, at 4:18 PM, keydana at gmx.de wrote:
>
> Hi,
> today on one of the extremely rare occasions where I can use scheme at work,
> I had to get at the frequencies for a list of ids extracted from a logfile.
> E.g., I had a list like
> '(1234 1234 5678 1234)
> and wanted to, on the one hand, remove the duplicates and, on the other
> hand, store how many instances there were of each id.
> For example, if represented as an alist, the result might have looked like
> this:
> '((1234 3) (5678 1))
> However, I could not imagine a "purely functional" way to do this, and so I
> used a box to update the frequencies, like so:
> (define count
>  (lambda (lst)
>    (let count-accum ((lst lst) (frequencies '()))
>      (if (null? lst)
>          frequencies
>          (let ((first (car lst)))
>            (cond ((assoc first frequencies)
>                   (let ((count-box (cdr (assoc first frequencies))))
>                     (begin (set-box! count-box (+ 1 (unbox count-box)))
>                            (count-accum (cdr lst) frequencies))))
>                  (else (count-accum (cdr lst) (cons (cons first (box 1))
> frequencies)))))))))
>
> (I also considered a hashtable, which would have been equally "impure" and
> less practical, because the next processing step again required a list).
> I suppose there must be "more functional" (if I may say so) and more elegant
> ways to perform this task. I'd be glad to learn and thankful for any
> suggestions :-)
> Ciao
> Sigrid
>
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