Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford / 2003 / Functional programming, data structures and algorithms, procedural programming, and digital hardware / 3 / a / iv

Use first cousins: the children of the siblings of a recorded parent. This includes cousins through a parent's half-sibling under the convention above. In Haskell:

cousins :: Database -> Person -> [Person]
cousins db p = unique [q | parent <- parents db p,
                          auntOrUncle <- siblings db parent,
                          q <- children db auntOrUncle, q /= p]

Selecting siblings of parents avoids the mistake of returning all people with a common grandparent, which would also return ordinary siblings. The explicit exclusion of p is harmless on an ordinary consistent pedigree and prevents a self-result in unusual records. Multiple relationship paths give just one output entry after duplicate removal. Thus