Intersection and union of 2 lists

Question

i\'m starting up learning prolog (i use SWI-prolog) and i did a simple exercise in which i have 2 lists and i want to calculate their intersection and union. Here is my code

Answer 1

The following is based on my previous answer to Remove duplicates in list (Prolog); the basic idea is, in turn, based on @false's answer to Prolog union for A U B U C.

What message do I want to convey to you?

• You can describe what you want in Prolog with logical purity.
• Using if_/3 and (=)/3 a logically pure implementation can be
  • both efficient (leaving behind choice points only when needed)
  • and monotone (logically sound with regard to generalization / specialization).
• The implementation of @false's predicates if_/3 and (=)/3 does use meta-logical Prolog features internally, but (from the outside) behaves logically pure.

The following implementation of list_list_intersection/3 and list_list_union/3 uses list_item_isMember/3 and list_item_subtracted/3, defined in a previous answer:

list_list_union([],Bs,Bs).
list_list_union([A|As],Bs1,[A|Cs]) :-
    list_item_subtracted(Bs1,A,Bs),
    list_list_union(As,Bs,Cs).

list_list_intersection([],_,[]).
list_list_intersection([A|As],Bs,Cs1) :-
    if_(list_item_isMember(Bs,A), Cs1 = [A|Cs], Cs1 = Cs),
    list_list_intersection(As,Bs,Cs).

Here's the query you posted as part of your question:

?- list_list_intersection([1,3,5,2,4],[6,1,2],Intersection).
Intersection = [1, 2].                    % succeeds deterministically

Let's try something else... The following two queries should be logically equivalent:

?- A=1,B=3, list_list_intersection([1,3,5,2,4],[A,B],Intersection).
A = 1,
B = 3,
Intersection = [1, 3].
?- list_list_intersection([1,3,5,2,4],[A,B],Intersection),A=1,B=3.
A = 1,
B = 3,
Intersection = [1, 3] ;
false.

And... the bottom line is?

• With pure code it's easy to stay on the side of logical soundness.
• Impure code, on the other hand, more often than not acts like "it does what it should" at first sight, but shows all kinds of illogical behaviour with queries like the ones shown above.

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Edit 2015-04-23

Neither list_list_union(As,Bs,Cs) nor list_list_intersection(As,Bs,Cs) guarantee that Cs doesn't contain duplicates. If that bothers you, the code needs to be adapted.

Here are some more queries (and answers) with As and/or Bs containing duplicates:

?- list_list_intersection([1,3,5,7,1,3,5,7],[1,2,3,1,2,3],Cs).
Cs = [1, 3, 1, 3].
?- list_list_intersection([1,2,3],[1,1,1,1],Cs).
Cs = [1].

?- list_list_union([1,3,5,1,3,5],[1,2,3,1,2,3],Cs).
Cs = [1, 3, 5, 1, 3, 5, 2, 2]. 
?- list_list_union([1,2,3],[1,1,1,1],Cs).
Cs = [1, 2, 3].
?- list_list_union([1,1,1,1],[1,2,3],Cs).
Cs = [1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3].

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Edit 2015-04-24

For the sake of completeness, here's how we could enforce that the intersection and the union are sets---that is lists that do not contain any duplicate elements.

The following code is pretty straight-forward:

list_list_intersectionSet([],_,[]).
list_list_intersectionSet([A|As1],Bs,Cs1) :-
    if_(list_item_isMember(Bs,A), Cs1 = [A|Cs], Cs1 = Cs),
    list_item_subtracted(As1,A,As),
    list_list_intersectionSet(As,Bs,Cs).

list_list_unionSet([],Bs1,Bs) :-
    list_setB(Bs1,Bs).
list_list_unionSet([A|As1],Bs1,[A|Cs]) :-
    list_item_subtracted(As1,A,As),
    list_item_subtracted(Bs1,A,Bs),
    list_list_unionSet(As,Bs,Cs).

Note that list_list_unionSet/3 is based on list_setB/2, defined here.

Now let's see both list_list_intersectionSet/3 and list_list_unionSet/3 in action:

?- list_list_unionSet([1,2,3,1,2,3,3,2,1],[4,5,6,2,7,7,7],Xs).
Xs = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

?- list_list_intersectionSet([1,2,3,1,2,3,3,2,1],[4,5,6,2,7,7,7],Xs).
Xs = [2].

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Edit 2019-01-30

Here is an additional query taken from @GuyCoder's comment (plus two variants of it):

?- list_list_unionSet(Xs,[],[a,b]).
   Xs = [a,b]
;  Xs = [a,b,b]
;  Xs = [a,b,b,b]
...

?- list_list_unionSet([],Xs,[a,b]).
   Xs = [a,b]
;  Xs = [a,b,b]
;  Xs = [a,b,b,b]
...

?- list_list_unionSet(Xs,Ys,[a,b]).
   Xs = [], Ys = [a,b]
;  Xs = [], Ys = [a,b,b]
;  Xs = [], Ys = [a,b,b,b]
...

With the old version of list_item_subtracted/3, above queries didn't terminate existentially.

With the new one they do. As the solution set size is infinite, none of these queries terminate universally.