Prelude.Experimental

The builtin linked list type.

In Haskell, lists are one of the most important data types as they are often used analogous to loops in imperative programming languages. These lists are singly linked, which makes them unsuited for operations that require \mathcal{O}(1) access. Instead, they are intended to be traversed.

You can use List a or [a] in type signatures:

length :: [a] -> Int

or

length :: List a -> Int

They are fully equivalent, and List a will be normalised to [a].

Usage

Lists are constructed recursively using the right-associative constructor operator (or cons) (:) :: a -> [a] -> [a], which prepends an element to a list, and the empty list [].

(1 : 2 : 3 : []) == (1 : (2 : (3 : []))) == [1, 2, 3]

Lists can also be constructed using list literals of the form [x_1, x_2, ..., x_n] which are syntactic sugar and, unless -XOverloadedLists is enabled, are translated into uses of (:) and []

String literals, like "I 💜 hs", are translated into Lists of characters, ['I', ' ', '💜', ' ', 'h', 's'].

Implementation

Internally and in memory, all the above are represented like this, with arrows being pointers to locations in memory.

╭───┬───┬──╮   ╭───┬───┬──╮   ╭───┬───┬──╮   ╭────╮
│(:)│   │ ─┼──>│(:)│   │ ─┼──>│(:)│   │ ─┼──>│ [] │
╰───┴─┼─┴──╯   ╰───┴─┼─┴──╯   ╰───┴─┼─┴──╯   ╰────╯
      v              v              v
      1              2              3

Examples

>>> ['H', 'a', 's', 'k', 'e', 'l', 'l']
"Haskell"

>>> 1 : [4, 1, 5, 9]
[1,4,1,5,9]

>>> [] : [] : []
[[],[]]