Programming Praxis - Pascal’s Triangle

In today’s Programming Praxis our task is to neatly display Pascal’s triangle. Let’s get started, shall we?

A quick import to making printing slightly more convenient:

import Text.Printf

Calculating Pascal’s triangle is trivial:

pascal :: [[Integer]]
pascal = iterate (\prev -> 1 : zipWith (+) prev (tail prev) ++ [1]) [1]

To display the triangle correctly, we need to prepend the appropriate amount of spacing to each line based on the longest (i.e. last) line.

prettyPascal :: Int -> IO ()
prettyPascal n = mapM_ (\r -> printf "%*s\n" (div (longest + length r) 2) r) rows
    where rows = map (unwords . map show) $ take (n + 1) pascal
          longest = length $ last rows

An that’s all there is to it. A quick test to see if everything is working proprely:

main :: IO ()
main = prettyPascal 10

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Tags: bonsai, code, Haskell, kata, pascal, praxis, programming, triangle