Claudio Cherubino's blog Life of a Googler

Remove duplicate values from a List in F#

Once in a while I give a look at the web server log to find out how people landed in this blog and yesterday there was someone that entered the following search string into Google:

Given a random List of integers, write a function that removes all the duplicate values

This site appears as the first result, even if there is no solution for that problem, but I want to help you anyway, unknown visitor!

In fact, we can make use of the Set data type to easily solve the problem.

According to the definition, a Set represents a collection of elements without duplicates.
So, if we create a Set from the given list, all duplicate values will be automatically filtered.

This can be done in a single line, I'll call the function nub because this is the name of the corresponding Haskell one:

let nub xs = xs |> Set.of_list |> Set.to_list

As I said, to return a List without duplicate values we just need to create a Set from it and then create a List from the new Set.

Do you think it is fair to act this way or should I say that I'm cheating?