so I am new to OCaml and im having some trouble with lists. What I have is a List of chars as follows:
let letters = [a;b;c;d]
I would like to know how can I iterate the list and apply a fuction that takes as arguments every possible combination of two chars on the list (do_someting char1 char2), for example: a and b (do_something a b), a and c .... d and b, d and c; never repeating the same element (a and a or c and c should not happen).
OCaml is a functional language, so we want to try to break down the procedure into as many functional pieces as we can.
Step 1 is "take a list of things and produce all combinations". We don't care what happens afterward; we just want to know all such combinations. If you want each combination to appear only once (i.e. (a, b) will appear but (b, a) will not, in your example), then a simple recursive definition will suffice.
let rec ordered_pairs xs =
match xs with
| [] -> []
| (x :: xs) -> List.append (List.map (fun y -> (x, y)) xs) (ordered_pairs xs)
If you want the reversed duplicates ((a, b) and (b, a)), then we can add them in at the end.
let swap (x, y) = (y, x)
let all_ordered_pairs xs =
let p = ordered_pairs xs in
List.append p (List.map swap p)
Now we have a list of all of the tuples. What happens next depends on what kind of result you want. In all likelihood, you're looking at something from the built-in List module. If you want to apply the function to each pair for the side effects, List.iter does the trick. If you want to accumulate the results into a new list, List.map will do it. If you want to apply some operation to combine the results (say, each function returns a number and you want the sum of the numbers), then List.map followed by List.fold_left (or the composite List.fold_left_map) will do.
Of course, if you're just starting out, it can be instructive to write these List functions yourself. Every one of them is a simple one- or two- line recursive definition and is very instructive to write on your own.