Why it’s hard for programmers to write a program to flatten a list?

Re:Why it’s hard for programmers to write a program to flatt... by brudgers on Friday February 24, 2017 @04:44PM (#13728217)

The example input in the article is:

  [1,[2,3], [4, [5,6]]]

It happens to be representable as a binary tree. Indeterminacy regarding whether or not that is accidental or intentional is due to underspecification of the interview problem. The first time I read a description of Linkedin using logs as the fundamental data structure (for what turns out to be Kafka I later learned) I had an epiphany that there is no such thing as a generic simple data structure living in the wild because data is data because it has semantics, without semantics it is just noise.

To me, it looks like the root node is |1|.

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Re:Why it’s hard for programmers to write a program to flatt... by pcmonk on Friday February 24, 2017 @05:50PM (#13728673)

To me, "nested list structure" means list-of-lists, which implies a certain natural tree representation, where all elements in a list are siblings.

But maybe I've just been poisoned by Lisp, which tries to use lists as the elusive generic simple data structure.

(OT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists)

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