### A throwback into middle school

Here’s a programming pearl based straight out of your grade 6 mathematics text book. Getting any déjà vu from the notation given below?

This is nothing but the set-builder notation: this particular example represents the set of first 10 even numbers (considering 0 to be an even number). $Z$ represents the set of integers.

### Set builders in code

List comprehensions are rip-offs of the set-builder notation. In Clojure, the for macro is used to create a list comprehension. The first 10 even numbers can be generated using:

Without list comprehensions, the same can be written using a map:

Although it might seem that the for style is more declarative than the code using map, it is a matter of taste as to which style is preferable. In some cases though, one style will result in more readable code:

Clearly, the list comprehension wins here.

### Yet another shining use of Haskell

Hardly any programming language depicts list comprehensions as beautifully as Haskell does.

The beauty comes across since Haskell stays true to the set-builder notation as close as possible, and has no surrounding fluff like keywords to express constraints. Both Python and Clojure use for to represent list comprehensions, and they use if and when respectively to express constraints. Haskell does away with all ceremony.

Let’s illustrate the same with the code to generate Pythagorean triplets $\le$ 10:

Okay, Clojure fans might cry foul because there isn’t an out-of-the-box power function - but did anyone notice the for and the when? In Haskell, the code would look like:

### Epilogue: A Project Euler problem

Finally, let’s whip up some code to solve the problem on Pythagorean triplets on Project Euler, using list comprehensions: