Haskell cartesian product of infinite lists

You could look at your space as a tree. At the root of the tree one picks the first element and in its child you pick the second element..

Here's your tree defined using the ListTree package:

import Control.Monad.ListT
import Data.List.Class
import Data.List.Tree
import Prelude hiding (scanl)

infiniteTree :: ListT [] Integer
infiniteTree = repeatM [0..]

spacesTree :: ListT [] [Integer]
spacesTree = scanl (\xs x -> xs ++ [x]) [] infiniteTree

twoDimSpaceTree = genericTake 3 spacesTree

It's an infinite tree, but we could enumerate over it for example in DFS order:

ghci> take 10 (dfs twoDimSpaceTree)
[[],[0],[0,0],[0,1],[0,2],[0,3],[0,4],[0,5],[0,6],[0,7]]

The order you want, in tree-speak, is a variant of best-first-search for infinite trees, where one assumes that the children of tree nodes are sorted (you can't compare all the node's children as in normal best-first-search because there are infinitely many of those). Luckily, this variant is already implemented:

ghci> take 10 $ bestFirstSearchSortedChildrenOn sum $ genericTake 3 $ spacesTree
[[],[0],[0,0],[0,1],[1],[1,0],[1,1],[0,2],[2],[2,0]]

You can use any norm you like for your expanding shells, instead of sum above.

The data-ordlist package has some functions which are extremely useful for working with sorted infinite lits. One of these is mergeAllBy, which combines an infinite list of infinite lists using some comparison function.

The idea is then to build an infinite list of lists such that y is fixed in each list, while x grows. As long as we can guarantee that each list is sorted, and that the heads of the lists are sorted, according to our ordering, we get a merged sorted list back.

Here's a quick example:

import Data.List.Ordered
import Data.Ord

genFromPair (e1, e2) = mergeAllBy (comparing norm) [[x.*e1 + y.*e2 | x <- [0..]] | y <- [0..]]

-- The rest just defines a simple vector type so we have something to play with
data Vec a = Vec a a
    deriving (Eq, Show)

instance Num a => Num (Vec a) where
    (Vec x1 y1) + (Vec x2 y2) = Vec (x1+x2) (y1+y2)
    -- ...

s .* (Vec x y) = Vec (s*x) (s*y)     
norm (Vec x y) = sqrt (x^2 + y^2)

Trying this in GHCi we get the expected result:

*Main> take 5 $ genFromPair (Vec 0 1, Vec 1 0)
[Vec 0.0 0.0,Vec 0.0 1.0,Vec 1.0 0.0,Vec 1.0 1.0,Vec 0.0 2.0]