Basic sequence transformations
Let's revisit the functional solution of the sample problem from Chapter 1, Begin Thinking Functionally. It represents the common functional pattern of finding a given property of the collection as follows:
From the given string literal representing 1000 consecutive single digit characters, make a collection of the collections represented by chunks of just five consecutive single digit characters of the original collection. Each chunk takes the inner characters of a five character-wide stencil aligned first with the left-hand side border of the string literal. The stencil then gets moved to the right by a single character before extracting the next sub collection. This sliding of the stencil to the right is continued until the right-hand side borders of both the stencil and the literal get aligned. To be exact, the main sequence consists of 996 such five character sub sequences.
Note that the originally sought-for property of the maximal product of five consecutive...