Friday, July 25, 2014

Cartesian product (redux)

Cartesian product (redux)

In this blog post we looked at programs to compute Cartesian Products. One algorithm (given here in OCaml) if you recall is
let prod l r =
  let g acc a =
    let f acc x =
      (a, x) :: acc
    in List.fold_left f acc r
  in List.fold_left g [] l |> List.rev

In that earlier post I translated the above program into C++. This time I'm doing the same straightforward translation but using the Boost.MPL library to compute such products at compile time. It looks like this:

#include <boost/mpl/pair.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/vector.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/push_front.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/fold.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/reverse.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/placeholders.hpp>

using namespace boost::mpl::placeholders;

template <class L, class R>
struct product
{
  struct g {
    template <class AccT, class A>
    struct apply {
       typedef typename boost::mpl::fold <
         R, AccT
        , boost::mpl::push_front<_1, boost::mpl::pair<A, _2> > 
         >::type type;
    };
  };

  typedef typename boost::mpl::reverse <
    typename boost::mpl::fold <
                  L, boost::mpl::vector<>, g>::type>::type type;
};
The translation proceeds almost mechanically! Does it work though? You betcha! Here's a test we can convince ourselves with:
#include <boost/mpl/equal.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/for_each.hpp>
#include <boost/mpl/int.hpp>

#include <iostream>

using namespace boost::mpl;

typedef vector<int_<1>, int_<2> > A;
typedef vector<int_<3>, int_<4>, int_<5> > B;
typedef product <A, B>::type result;

BOOST_MPL_ASSERT((
  equal<
    result
  , vector<
         pair<int_<1>, int_<3> >
       , pair<int_<1>, int_<4> >
       , pair<int_<1>, int_<5> >
       , pair<int_<2>, int_<3> >
       , pair<int_<2>, int_<4> >
       , pair<int_<2>, int_<5> >
      > 
  > ));

struct print_class_name {
    template <typename T>
    void operator()( T t ) const {
       std::cout << typeid(t).name() << " ";
    }
};

int main ()
{
  boost::mpl::for_each<result>(print_class_name());

  return 0;
}
The takeaway is, learning yourself some functional programming is a great way to improve your template meta-programming fu! (That of course should come as no surprise... )