Efficiently get sorted sums of a sorted list

Question

You have an ascending list of numbers, what is the most efficient algorithm you can think of to get the ascending list of sums of every two numbers in that list. Duplicates in

Answer 1

The best I could come up with is to produce a matrix of sums of each pair, and then merge the rows together, a-la merge sort. I feel like I'm missing some simple insight that will reveal a much more efficient solution.

My algorithm, in Haskell:

matrixOfSums list = [[a+b | b <- list, b >= a] | a <- list]

sortedSums = foldl merge [] matrixOfSums

--A normal merge, save that we remove duplicates
merge xs [] = xs
merge [] ys = ys
merge (x:xs) (y:ys) = case compare x y of
    LT -> x:(merge xs (y:ys))
    EQ -> x:(merge xs (dropWhile (==x) ys))
    GT -> y:(merge (x:xs) ys)

I found a minor improvement, one that's more amenable to lazy stream-based coding. Instead of merging the columns pair-wise, merge all of them at once. The advantage being that you start getting elements of the list immediately.

-- wide-merge does a standard merge (ala merge-sort) across an arbitrary number of lists
-- wideNubMerge does this while eliminating duplicates
wideNubMerge :: Ord a => [[a]] -> [a]
wideNubMerge ls = wideNubMerge1 $ filter (/= []) ls
wideNubMerge1 [] = []
wideNubMerge1 ls = mini:(wideNubMerge rest)
    where mini = minimum $ map head ls
          rest = map (dropWhile (== mini)) ls

betterSortedSums = wideNubMerge matrixOfSums

However, if you know you're going to use all of the sums, and there's no advantage to getting some of them earlier, go with 'foldl merge []', as it's faster.