array Constructs an immutable array from a pair of bounds and a list of initial associations.
The bounds are specified as a pair of the lowest and highest bounds in the array respectively. For example, a one-origin vector of length 10 has bounds (1,10), and a one-origin 10 by 10 matrix has bounds ((1,1),(10,10)).
An association is a pair of the form (i,x), which defines the value of
the array at index i to be x. The array is undefined if any index
in the list is out of bounds. If any two associations in the list have
the same index, the value at that index is implementation-dependent.
(In GHC, the last value specified for that index is used.
Other implementations will also do this for unboxed arrays, but Haskell
98 requires that for Array the value at such indices is bottom.)
Because the indices must be checked for these errors, array is
strict in the bounds argument and in the indices of the association
list. Whether array is strict or non-strict in the elements depends
on the array type: Array is a non-strict array type, but
all of the UArray arrays are strict. Thus in a
non-strict array, recurrences such as the following are possible:
a = array (1,100) ((1,1) : [(i, i * a!(i-1)) | i \<- [2..100]])Not every index within the bounds of the array need appear in the association list, but the values associated with indices that do not appear will be undefined.
If, in any dimension, the lower bound is greater than the upper bound, then the array is legal, but empty. Indexing an empty array always gives an array-bounds error, but bounds still yields the bounds with which the array was constructed.