Haskell (programming language)

Haskell
Paradigm functional, imperative, lazy/non-strict, modular
Designed by Lennart Augustsson, Dave Barton, Brian Boutel, Warren Burton, Joseph Fasel, Kevin Hammond, Ralf Hinze, Paul Hudak, John Hughes, Thomas Johnsson, Mark Jones, Simon Peyton Jones, John Launchbury, Erik Meijer, John Peterson, Alastair Reid, Colin Runciman, Philip Wadler
First appeared 1990 (1990)[1]
Stable release
Haskell 2010[2] / July 2010 (2010-07)
Preview release
Haskell 2014 announced[3]
Typing discipline static, strong, inferred
OS Cross-platform
Filename extensions .hs, .lhs
Website haskell.org
Major implementations
GHC, Hugs, NHC, JHC, Yhc, UHC
Dialects
Helium, Gofer
Influenced by

Clean,[4] FP,[4] Gofer,[4] Hope and Hope+,[4] Id,[4] ISWIM,[4] KRC,[4] Lisp,[4] Miranda,[4] ML and Standard ML,[4] Orwell, SASL,[4]

Scheme,[4] SISAL[4]
Influenced
Agda,[5] Bluespec,[6] C++11/Concepts,[7] C#/LINQ,[8][9][10][11] CAL, Cayenne,[8] Clean,[8] Clojure,[12] CoffeeScript,[13] Curry,[8] Elm, Epigram, Escher,[14] F#,[15] Frege,[16] Hack,[17] Idris,[18] Isabelle,[8] Java/Generics,[8] LiveScript,[19] Mercury,[8] Ωmega, Perl 6,[20] Python,[8][21] Rust,[22] Scala,[8][23] Swift,[24] Timber,[25] Visual Basic 9.0[8][9]

Haskell /ˈhæskəl/[26] is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing.[27] It is named after logician Haskell Curry.[1] The latest standard of Haskell is Haskell 2010. As of May 2016, a group is working on the next version, Haskell 2020.[28]

Haskell features a type system with type inference[29] and lazy evaluation.[30] Type classes first appeared in the Haskell programming language.[31] Its main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

Haskell is based on the semantics, but not the syntax, of the language Miranda, which served to focus the efforts of the initial Haskell working group.[32] Haskell is used widely in academia[33][34] and also used in industry.[35]

History

Following the release of Miranda by Research Software Ltd, in 1985, interest in lazy functional languages grew. By 1987, more than a dozen non-strict, purely functional programming languages existed. Of these, Miranda was used most widely, but it was proprietary software. At the conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture (FPCA '87) in Portland, Oregon, a meeting was held during which participants formed a strong consensus that a committee should be formed to define an open standard for such languages. The committee's purpose was to consolidate the existing functional languages into a common one that would serve as a basis for future research in functional-language design.[36]

Haskell 1.0 to 1.4

The first version of Haskell ("Haskell 1.0") was defined in 1990.[1] The committee's efforts resulted in a series of language definitions (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4).

Haskell 98

In late 1997, the series culminated in Haskell 98, intended to specify a stable, minimal, portable version of the language and an accompanying standard library for teaching, and as a base for future extensions. The committee expressly welcomed creating extensions and variants of Haskell 98 via adding and incorporating experimental features.[36]

In February 1999, the Haskell 98 language standard was originally published as The Haskell 98 Report.[36] In January 2003, a revised version was published as Haskell 98 Language and Libraries: The Revised Report.[27] The language continues to evolve rapidly, with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) implementation representing the current de facto standard.[37]

Haskell 2010

In early 2006, the process of defining a successor to the Haskell 98 standard, informally named Haskell Prime, began.[38] This was intended to be an ongoing incremental process to revise the language definition, producing a new revision up to once per year. The first revision, named Haskell 2010, was announced in November 2009[2] and published in July 2010.

Haskell 2010 adds the foreign function interface (FFI) to Haskell, allowing for bindings to other programming languages, fixes some syntax issues (changes in the formal grammar), and bans so-called n-plus-k-patterns, that is, definitions of the form fact (n+1) = (n+1) * fact n are no longer allowed. It introduces the Language-Pragma-Syntax-Extension which allows for code designating a Haskell source as Haskell 2010 or requiring certain extensions to the Haskell language. The names of the extensions introduced in Haskell 2010 are DoAndIfThenElse, HierarchicalModules, EmptyDataDeclarations, FixityResolution, ForeignFunctionInterface, LineCommentSyntax, PatternGuards, RelaxedDependencyAnalysis, LanguagePragma and NoNPlusKPatterns.[2]

Features

Main article: Haskell features

Haskell features lazy evaluation, pattern matching, list comprehension, type classes, and type polymorphism. It is a purely functional language, which means that in general, functions in Haskell have no side effects. A distinct construct exists to represent side effects, orthogonal to the type of functions. A pure function may return a side effect which is subsequently executed, modeling the impure functions of other languages.

Haskell has a strong, static type system based on Hindley–Milner type inference. Haskell's principal innovation in this area is to add type classes, originally conceived as a principled way to add overloading to the language,[39] but since finding many more uses.[40]

The construct which represents side effects is an example of a monad. Monads are a general framework which can model different kinds of computation, including error handling, nondeterminism, parsing, and software transactional memory. Monads are defined as ordinary datatypes, but Haskell provides some syntactic sugar for their use.

Haskell has an open, published specification,[27] and multiple implementations exist. Its main implementation, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), is both an interpreter and native-code compiler that runs on most platforms. GHC is noted for its high-performance implementation of concurrency and parallelism,[41] and for having a rich type system incorporating recent innovations such as generalized algebraic data types and type families.

A growing active community exists around the language, and more than 5,400 third-party open-source libraries and tools are available in the online package repository Hackage.[42]

Code examples

The following is a Hello world program written in Haskell:[because 1]

module Main where

main :: IO ()
main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"

Here is the factorial function in Haskell, defined in a few different ways:

-- Type annotation (optional)
factorial :: (Integral a) => a -> a

-- Using recursion
factorial n | n < 2 = 1
factorial n = n * factorial (n - 1)

-- Using recursion, with guards
factorial n
  | n < 2     = 1
  | otherwise = n * factorial (n - 1)

-- Using recursion but written without pattern matching
factorial n = if n > 0 then n * factorial (n-1) else 1

-- Using a list
factorial n = product [1..n]

-- Using fold (implements product)
factorial n = foldl (*) 1 [1..n]

-- Point-free style
factorial = foldr (*) 1 . enumFromTo 1

An efficient implementation of the Fibonacci numbers, as an infinite list, is this:

-- Type annotation (optional)
fib :: Int -> Integer

-- With self-referencing data
fib n = fibs !! n
        where fibs = 0 : scanl (+) 1 fibs
        -- 0,1,1,2,3,5,...

-- Same, coded directly
fib n = fibs !! n
        where fibs = 0 : 1 : next fibs
              next (a : t@(b:_)) = (a+b) : next t

-- Similar idea, using zipWith
fib n = fibs !! n
        where fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)

-- Using a generator function
fib n = fibs (0,1) !! n
        where fibs (a,b) = a : fibs (b,a+b)

The Int type refers to a machine-sized integer (used as a list subscript with the !! operator), while Integer is an arbitrary-precision integer. For example, using Integer, the factorial code above easily computes factorial 100000 as a huge number, of 456,574 digits, with no loss of precision.

This is an implementation of an algorithm similar to quick sort over lists, in which the first element is taken as the pivot:

-- Using list comprehensions
quickSort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quickSort []     = []                               -- The empty list is already sorted
quickSort (x:xs) = quickSort [a | a <- xs, a < x]   -- Sort the left part of the list
                   ++ [x] ++                        -- Insert pivot between two sorted parts
                   quickSort [a | a <- xs, a >= x]  -- Sort the right part of the list

-- Using filter
quickSort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quickSort []     = []
quickSort (x:xs) = quickSort (filter (<x) xs)
                   ++ [x] ++
                   quickSort (filter (>=x) xs)

Implementations

All listed implementations are distributed under open source licenses.[43]

Implementations which comply fully, or very nearly, with the Haskell 98 standard, include:

Implementations no longer being actively maintained include:

Implementations not fully Haskell 98 compliant, and using a variant Haskell language, include:

Applications

Industry

Web

Haskell web frameworks exist,[57] including:

Criticism

Jan-Willem Maessen, in 2002, and Simon Peyton Jones, in 2003, discussed problems associated with lazy evaluation while also acknowledging the theoretical motives for it,[59][60] in addition to purely practical considerations such as improved performance.[61] They note that, in addition to adding some performance overhead, lazy evaluation makes it more difficult for programmers to reason about the performance of their code (particularly its space use).

Bastiaan Heeren, Daan Leijen, and Arjan van IJzendoorn in 2003 also observed some stumbling blocks for Haskell learners: "The subtle syntax and sophisticated type system of Haskell are a double edged sword – highly appreciated by experienced programmers but also a source of frustration among beginners, since the generality of Haskell often leads to cryptic error messages."[62] To address these, researchers from Utrecht University developed an advanced interpreter called Helium which improved the user-friendliness of error messages by limiting the generality of some Haskell features, and in particular removing support for type classes.

Ben Lippmeier designed Disciple[63] as a strict-by-default (lazy by explicit annotation) dialect of Haskell with a type-and-effect system, to address Haskell's difficulties in reasoning about lazy evaluation and in using traditional data structures such as mutable arrays.[64] He argues (p. 20) that "destructive update furnishes the programmer with two important and powerful tools... a set of efficient array-like data structures for managing collections of objects, and ... the ability to broadcast a new value to all parts of a program with minimal burden on the programmer."

Robert Harper, one of the authors of Standard ML, has given his reasons for not using Haskell to teach introductory programming. Among these are the difficulty of reasoning about resource use with non-strict evaluation, that lazy evaluation complicates the definition of data types and inductive reasoning,[65] and the "inferiority" of Haskell's (old) class system compared to ML's module system.[66]

It was consistently criticised by developers due to the lack of good management of different versions of a particular library by default build tool cabal. Although this has been addressed by the release of the Stack, cabal continues to be shipped as the default build tool.

Related languages

Clean is a close, slightly older relative of Haskell. Its biggest deviation from Haskell is in the use of uniqueness types instead of monads for I/O and side-effects.

A series of languages inspired by Haskell, but with different type systems, have been developed, including:

Java virtual machine (JVM) based:

Other related languages include:

Haskell has served as a testbed for many new ideas in language design. There have been many Haskell variants produced, exploring new language ideas, including:

Conferences and workshops

The Haskell community meets regularly for research and development activities. The main events are:

Since 2006, a series of organized hackathons has occurred, the Hac series, aimed at improving the programming language tools and libraries.[78]

Since 2005, Haskell users' groups are growing in number.

Notes

  1. ↑ 'Hello world' is meant as the introductory prototype of a read-eval-print_loop. The IO tool putStrLn prints a string, which is the only essential line of this example. The second line of this example is a type definition, which is unnecessary for Haskell, because the compiler infers the type; instead, the second line serves to communicate the programmer's intention to the reader. The first line of the example isn't needed, either, because the start symbol main in this simple example makes the module Main a nicety, which instead would have been a necessity in a multi-module example. Rather, the first two lines are provided for consistency with larger examples.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Hudak et al. 2007.
  2. 1 2 3 Marlow, Simon (24 November 2009). "Announcing Haskell 2010". Haskell (Mailing list). Retrieved 12 March 2011.
  3. ↑ Lynagh, Ian (1 May 2013). "Haskell 2014". Haskell-prime (Mailing list). Retrieved 9 October 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Peyton Jones 2003, p. xi
  5. ↑ Norell, Ulf (2008). "Dependently Typed Programming in Agda" (PDF). Gothenburg: Chalmers University. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  6. ↑ Hudak et al. 2007, p. 12-38,43.
  7. ↑ Stroustrup, Bjarne; Sutton, Andrew (2011). "Design of Concept Libraries for C++" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 February 2012.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Hudak et al. 2007, pp. 12-45–46.
  9. 1 2 Meijer, Erik. "Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell". OOPSLA 2007.
  10. ↑ Meijer, Erik (1 October 2009). "C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer – Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 1 of 13". Channel 9. Microsoft. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  11. ↑ Drobi, Sadek (4 March 2009). "Erik Meijer on LINQ". InfoQ. QCon SF 2008: C4Media Inc. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  12. ↑ Hickey, Rich. "Clojure Bookshelf". Listmania!. Amazon.com. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  13. ↑ Heller, Martin (18 October 2011). "Turn up your nose at Dart and smell the CoffeeScript". JavaWorld. InfoWorld. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  14. ↑ "Declarative programming in Escher" (PDF). Retrieved 2015-10-07.
  15. ↑ Syme, Don; Granicz, Adam; Cisternino, Antonio (2007). Expert F#. Apress. p. 2. F# also draws from Haskell particularly with regard to two advanced language features called sequence expressions and workflows.
  16. ↑ Wechsung, Ingo. "The Frege Programming Language" (PDF). Retrieved 26 February 2014.
  17. ↑ "Facebook Introduces 'Hack,' the Programming Language of the Future". WIRED. 20 March 2014.
  18. ↑ "Idris, a dependently typed language". Retrieved 2014-10-26.
  19. ↑ "LiveScript Inspiration". Retrieved 2014-02-04.
  20. ↑ "Glossary of Terms and Jargon". Perl Foundation Perl 6 Wiki. The Perl Foundation. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  21. ↑ Kuchling, A. M. "Functional Programming HOWTO". Python v2.7.2 documentation. Python Software Foundation. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  22. ↑ "The Rust Reference: Appendix: Influences". Retrieved 2016-02-03.
  23. ↑ Fogus, Michael (6 August 2010). "MartinOdersky take(5) toList". Send More Paramedics. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  24. ↑ Lattner, Chris (2014-06-03). "Chris Lattner's Homepage". Chris Lattner. Retrieved 2014-06-03. The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.
  25. ↑ "Timber/History". Retrieved 2015-10-07.
  26. ↑ Chevalier, Tim (28 January 2008). "anybody can tell me the pronunciation of "haskell"?". Haskell-cafe (Mailing list). Retrieved 12 March 2011.
  27. 1 2 3 Peyton Jones 2003.
  28. ↑ https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2016-April/004050.html
  29. ↑ Type inference originally using Hindley-Milner type inference
  30. ↑ This allows finer control over the expression evaluation strategy
  31. ↑ "Type classes, first proposed during the design of the Haskell programming language, ..." —John Garrett Morris (2013), "Type Classes and Instance Chains: A Relational Approach"
  32. ↑ Edward Kmett, Edward Kmett - Type Classes vs. the World
  33. ↑ "Haskell in education". Retrieved 15 February 2016.
  34. ↑ "Haskell in research". Retrieved 15 February 2016.
  35. ↑ "Haskell in industry". Retrieved 15 February 2016.
  36. 1 2 3 Peyton Jones 2003, Preface.
  37. ↑ "Haskell Wiki: Implementations". Retrieved 18 December 2012.
  38. ↑ "Welcome to Haskell'". The Haskell' Wiki.
  39. ↑ Wadler, P.; Blott, S. (1989). "How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc". Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. ACM: 60–76. doi:10.1145/75277.75283. ISBN 0-89791-294-2.
  40. ↑ Hallgren, T. (January 2001). "Fun with Functional Dependencies, or Types as Values in Static Computations in Haskell". Proceedings of the Joint CS/CE Winter Meeting. Varberg, Sweden.
  41. ↑ Computer Language Benchmarks Game
  42. ↑ "HackageDB statistics". Hackage.haskell.org. Archived from the original on 2013-05-03. Retrieved 2013-06-26.
  43. ↑ "Implementations" at the Haskell Wiki
  44. ↑ "The LLVM Backend". GHC Trac.
  45. ↑ Terei, David A.; Chakravarty, Manuel M. T. (2010). "An LLVM Backend for GHC". Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Symposium 2010. ACM Press.
  46. ↑ C. Ryder and S. Thompson (2005). "Porting HaRe to the GHC API"
  47. ↑ Utrecht Haskell Compiler
  48. ↑ Boquist, Urban; Johnsson, Thomas (1996). "The GRIN Project: A Highly Optimising Back End for Lazy Functional Languages". LNCS. 1268: 58–84.
  49. ↑ Hudak et al. 2007, p. 12-22.
  50. ↑ "The Haskell Cabal". Retrieved 8 April 2015.
  51. ↑ "Linspire/Freespire Core OS Team and Haskell". Debian Haskell mailing list. May 2006.
  52. ↑ xmonad.org
  53. ↑ Shake Build System
  54. ↑ Metz, Cade (September 1, 2015). "Facebook's New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding". Wired. Retrieved September 1, 2015.
  55. ↑ Simon Marlow (2014), Open-sourcing Haxl
  56. 1 2 3 4 A formal proof of functional correctness was completed in 2009. Klein, Gerwin; Elphinstone, Kevin; Heiser, Gernot; Andronick, June; Cock, David; Derrin, Philip; Elkaduwe, Dhammika; Engelhardt, Kai; Kolanski, Rafal; Norrish, Michael; Sewell, Thomas; Tuch, Harvey; Winwood, Simon (October 2009). "seL4: Formal verification of an OS kernel" (PDF). 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles. Big Sky, MT, USA.
  57. ↑ "Web/Frameworks".
  58. ↑ "Snap: A Haskell Web Framework: Home". Snapframework.com. Retrieved 2013-06-26.
  59. ↑ Jan-Willem Maessen. Eager Haskell: Resource-bounded execution yields efficient iteration. Proceedings of the 2002 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell.
  60. ↑ Simon Peyton Jones. Wearing the hair shirt: a retrospective on Haskell. Invited talk at POPL 2003.
  61. ↑ Lazy evaluation can lead to excellent performance, such as in The Computer Language Benchmarks Game
  62. ↑ Heeren, Bastiaan; Leijen, Daan; van IJzendoorn, Arjan (2003). "Helium, for learning Haskell" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell.
  63. ↑ "DDC – HaskellWiki". Haskell.org. 2010-12-03. Retrieved 2013-06-26.
  64. ↑ Ben Lippmeier, Type Inference and Optimisation for an Impure World, Australian National University (2010) PhD thesis, chapter 1
  65. ↑ Robert Harper. "The point of laziness".
  66. ↑ Robert Harper. "Modules matter most.".
  67. ↑ "Frege Programming Language".
  68. ↑ "Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.".
  69. ↑ Marimuthu Madasamy. "mmhelloworld".
  70. ↑ "Codehaus".
  71. ↑ "Glasgow Parallel Haskell".
  72. ↑ "7.15. Parallel Haskell".
  73. ↑ "4.12. Using SMP parallelism".
  74. ↑ Todd Allen Amicon. "Computation Structures Group- MIT- LCS".
  75. ↑ "O'Haskell".
  76. ↑ "Home". GitHub.
  77. ↑ Ben. "Ben Morris' notebook".
  78. ↑ "Hackathon – HaskellWiki".

Further reading

Reports
Textbooks
Tutorials
History

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Haskell
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours
Tutorials
Miscellaneous
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