software/haskell

Haskell

Structure

Haskell programs consist of monads, actions, modules, ???

Basic Syntax

A “type declaration”:

main :: IO ()

An action definition. Note that whitespace matters; the block extends to all lines indented to the same position as the first non-whitespace after the do:

main = do
    stuff1
    stuff2

Lists

Lists in haskell are homogenous: all elements must of the same type. They are linked lists, so cons-ing on the front is cheap and concatonating on the end can be expensive.

Use ++ to concatonate two lists together:

['a','b','c'] ++ ['d','e','f']

Use : to cons (prepend) a single element:

0:[1,2,3,4,5,6]

Use !! to pull out an element by index (zero indexed):

['c','a','t'] !! 1

Strings are lists of characters: “baby” is equivalent to [‘b’,‘a’,‘b’,‘y’], which is equivalent to ‘b’:‘a’:‘b’:‘y’:[]. The empty set is [] and is distinct from [[]].

A couple functions help; ‘head’ is like ‘car’ and gives the first element, ‘tail’ is like ‘cdr’ and gives everything except the first element, ‘last’ gives the last non-empty element, and ‘init’ gives everything except the ‘last’. ‘length’ gives the number of elements, ‘null’ is a test to see if this is the empty list,

Compilation

By default the “main” action of the “Main” module is the action that is executed when a compiled haskell program is run by the operating system; this means that most haskell programs need to define these components.

The ghc (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) is the most popular. To compile and execute a simple one file haskell program you will do something like:

ghc -o hello helloworld.hs
./hello