I know from computability theory that it is possible to take the intersection of two infinite lists, but I can't find a way to express it in Haskell.
The traditional method fails as soon as the second list is infinite, because you spend all your time checking it for a non-matching element in the first list.
Example:
let ones = 1 : ones -- an unending list of 1sintersect [0,1] ones
This never yields 1
, as it never stops checking ones
for the element 0
.
A successful method needs to ensure that each element of each list will be visited in finite time.
Probably, this will be by iterating through both lists, and spending approximately equal time checking all previously-visited elements in each list against each other.
If possible, I'd like to also have a way to ignore duplicates in the lists, as it is occasionally necessary, but this is not a requirement.