List comprehension vs high-order functions in F#

Question

I come from SML background and feel quite comfortable with high-order functions. But I don\'t really get the idea of list comprehension. Is there any situation where list co

Answer 1

Adding to Tomas Petricek's answer. You can make the list version tail recursive.

let nums3 n =
    let rec nums3internal acc n = 
        if n = 100000 then
            acc
        else
            nums3internal (n::acc) (n+1) //Tail Call Optimization possible

    nums3internal [] n |> List.rev

nums3 0

With the added benefit of a considerable speedup. At least when I measured with the stopwatch tool I get. (nums2 being the algorithm using Seq).

Nums2 takes 81.225500ms
Nums3 takes 4.948700ms

For higher numbers this advantage shrinks, because List.rev is inefficient. E.g. for 10000000 I get:

Nums2 takes 11054.023900ms
Nums3 takes 8256.693100ms