I was wondering if any algorithm of that kind does exist, I don't have the slightest idea on how to program it...
For exemple if you give it [1;5;7] it should returns [(1,5);(1,7);(5,1);(5,7);(7,1);(7,5)]
I don't want to use any for loop.
Do you have any clue on how to achieve this ?
You have two cases: list is empty -> return empty list; list is not empty -> take first element x, for each element y yield (x, y) and make a recursive call on the tail of the list. Haskell:
pairs :: [a] -> [(a, a)]
pairs [] = []
pairs (x:xs) = [(x, x') | x' <- xs] ++ pairs xs
--*Main> pairs [1..10]
--[(1,2),(1,3),(1,4),(1,5),(1,6),(1,7),(1,8),(1,9),(1,10),(2,3),(2,4),(2,5),(2,6),(2,7),(2,8),(2,9),(2,10),(3,4),(3,5),(3,6),(3,7),(3,8),(3,9),(3,10),(4,5),(4,6),(4,7),(4,8),(4,9),(4,10),(5,6),(5,7),(5,8),(5,9),(5,10),(6,7),(6,8),(6,9),(6,10),(7,8),(7,9),(7,10),(8,9),(8,10),(9,10)]
I don't know is the algorithm used is a recursive one or not, but what are you asking for is the itertools.combinations('ABCD', 2) method from Python and I suppose the same thing is implemented in other programming language, so you can probably use the native method.
But if you need to write your own, then you can take a look at Algorithm to return all combinations of k elements from n (on this site) for some ideas
