Finding all combinations of well-formed brackets

Question

This came up while talking to a friend and I thought I\'d ask here since it\'s an interesting problem and would like to see other people\'s solutions.

The task is to

Answer 1

Common Lisp:

This doesn't print them, but does produce a list of lists of all the possible structures. My method is a bit different from the others'. It restructures the solutions to brackets(n - 1) such that they become brackets(n). My solution isn't tail recursive, but it could be made so with a little work.

Code

(defun brackets (n)
  (if (= 1 n)
      '((()))
      (loop for el in (brackets (1- n))
            when (cdr el)
            collect (cons (list (car el)) (cdr el))
            collect (list el)
            collect (cons '() el))))