Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-year-1-of-the-computer-science-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2014/functional-programming-design-and-analysis-of-algorithms/2/b/solution

Retain the first element, filter all its further occurrences out of the tail, and recurse:
removedup :: Eq a => [a] -> [a]
removedup []     = []
removedup (x:xs) = x : removedup (filter (/= x) xs)
The boxed specification is . The Haskell type class Eq is needed for comparing values. Structural induction on a finite list proves duplicate removal: filtering removes every further x, and the recursive result contains each remaining distinct value exactly once. In the worst case of all distinct values, successive filters give quadratic time complexity.

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