Problem 22

I started solving problem 22 by means of the monad IO. Since Haskell has already functions that read the file into a String and instantiate the String into a given type (belonging to the type class Read), it was rather straight forward. However, I made a small change to the names.txt, adding the list syntax to the list of files, i.e. I added the list symbols to the file. As one can see from the main function below, I start by reading the file, then I instantiated the string read into a list of strings and finally I applied a number of functions to that list of strings.

    import List

    main = do x <- readFile "names.txt"
              y <- readNames x
              print ((foldr (+) 0 . values 1 . sort) y)

    readNames :: String -> IO [String]
    readNames = readIO

The sort function is a pre-defined function in the List library that sorts the list of strings. Furthermore, the values function calculates the value of each name, by summing the value of each letter and multiplying it by the position of the name in the list. Note that instead of looking for the position each time, an integer is passed as parameter and it is incremented in order to show the position. Finally, it is just a matter of using a foldr to sum the list of integers. Below one can find the rest of the functions:

    values :: Int -> [String] -> [Int]
    values _ [] = []
    values n (x:xs) = (n * (value x)) : values (n+1) xs

    value = foldr (+) 0 . map getPosition

    getPosition x = case (elemIndex x ['A','B'..'Z']) of
                     Nothing -> 0
                     Just n -> n+1

The result of GHCi was (0.15 secs, 94072224 bytes)