Application operator. This operator is redundant, since ordinary application (f x) means the same as (f $ x). However, $ has low, right-associative binding precedence, so it sometimes allows parentheses to be omitted; for example:

    f $ g $ h x  =  f (g (h x))

It is also useful in higher-order situations, such as map ($ 0) xs, or zipWith ($) fs xs.

Strict (call-by-value) application, defined in terms of seq.

Boolean "and"

Boolean "or"

morphism composition

Boolean "not"

otherwise is defined as the value True. It helps to make guards more readable. eg.

 f x | x < 0     = ...
     | otherwise = ...

Extract the first component of a pair.

Extract the second component of a pair.

the identity morphism

The maybe function takes a default value, a function, and a Maybe value. If the Maybe value is Nothing, the function returns the default value. Otherwise, it applies the function to the value inside the Just and returns the result.

Case analysis for the Either type. If the value is Left a, apply the first function to a; if it is Right b, apply the second function to b.

flip f takes its (first) two arguments in the reverse order of f.

Constant function.

error stops execution and displays an error message.

uncurry converts a curried function to a function on pairs.

curry converts an uncurried function to a curried function.

Swap the components of a pair.

until p f yields the result of applying f until p holds.

asTypeOf is a type-restricted version of const. It is usually used as an infix operator, and its typing forces its first argument (which is usually overloaded) to have the same type as the second.

A special case of error. It is expected that compilers will recognize this and insert error messages which are more appropriate to the context in which undefined appears.

Evaluates its first argument to head normal form, and then returns its second argument as the result.

The Ord class is used for totally ordered datatypes.

Instances of Ord can be derived for any user-defined datatype whose constituent types are in Ord. The declared order of the constructors in the data declaration determines the ordering in derived Ord instances. The Ordering datatype allows a single comparison to determine the precise ordering of two objects.

Minimal complete definition: either compare or <=. Using compare can be more efficient for complex types.

The Eq class defines equality (==) and inequality (/=). All the basic datatypes exported by the Prelude are instances of Eq, and Eq may be derived for any datatype whose constituents are also instances of Eq.

Minimal complete definition: either == or /=.

The Bounded class is used to name the upper and lower limits of a type. Ord is not a superclass of Bounded since types that are not totally ordered may also have upper and lower bounds.

The Bounded class may be derived for any enumeration type; minBound is the first constructor listed in the data declaration and maxBound is the last. Bounded may also be derived for single-constructor datatypes whose constituent types are in Bounded.

Class Enum defines operations on sequentially ordered types.

The enumFrom... methods are used in Haskell's translation of arithmetic sequences.

Instances of Enum may be derived for any enumeration type (types whose constructors have no fields). The nullary constructors are assumed to be numbered left-to-right by fromEnum from 0 through n-1. See Chapter 10 of the Haskell Report for more details.

For any type that is an instance of class Bounded as well as Enum, the following should hold:

• The calls succ maxBound and pred minBound should result in a runtime error.
• fromEnum and toEnum should give a runtime error if the result value is not representable in the result type. For example, toEnum 7 :: Bool is an error.
• enumFrom and enumFromThen should be defined with an implicit bound, thus:

   enumFrom     x   = enumFromTo     x maxBound
   enumFromThen x y = enumFromThenTo x y bound
     where
       bound | fromEnum y >= fromEnum x = maxBound
             | otherwise                = minBound

Conversion of values to readable Strings.

Minimal complete definition: showsPrec or show.

Derived instances of Show have the following properties, which are compatible with derived instances of Read:

• The result of show is a syntactically correct Haskell expression containing only constants, given the fixity declarations in force at the point where the type is declared. It contains only the constructor names defined in the data type, parentheses, and spaces. When labelled constructor fields are used, braces, commas, field names, and equal signs are also used.
• If the constructor is defined to be an infix operator, then showsPrec will produce infix applications of the constructor.
• the representation will be enclosed in parentheses if the precedence of the top-level constructor in x is less than d (associativity is ignored). Thus, if d is 0 then the result is never surrounded in parentheses; if d is 11 it is always surrounded in parentheses, unless it is an atomic expression.
• If the constructor is defined using record syntax, then show will produce the record-syntax form, with the fields given in the same order as the original declaration.

For example, given the declarations

infixr 5 :^:
data Tree a =  Leaf a  |  Tree a :^: Tree a

the derived instance of Show is equivalent to

instance (Show a) => Show (Tree a) where

       showsPrec d (Leaf m) = showParen (d > app_prec) $
            showString "Leaf " . showsPrec (app_prec+1) m
         where app_prec = 10

       showsPrec d (u :^: v) = showParen (d > up_prec) $
            showsPrec (up_prec+1) u .
            showString " :^: "      .
            showsPrec (up_prec+1) v
         where up_prec = 5

Note that right-associativity of :^: is ignored. For example,

• show (Leaf 1 :^: Leaf 2 :^: Leaf 3) produces the string "Leaf 1 :^: (Leaf 2 :^: Leaf 3)".

Parsing of Strings, producing values.

Minimal complete definition: readsPrec (or, for GHC only, readPrec)

Derived instances of Read make the following assumptions, which derived instances of Show obey:

• If the constructor is defined to be an infix operator, then the derived Read instance will parse only infix applications of the constructor (not the prefix form).
• Associativity is not used to reduce the occurrence of parentheses, although precedence may be.
• If the constructor is defined using record syntax, the derived Read will parse only the record-syntax form, and furthermore, the fields must be given in the same order as the original declaration.
• The derived Read instance allows arbitrary Haskell whitespace between tokens of the input string. Extra parentheses are also allowed.

For example, given the declarations

infixr 5 :^:
data Tree a =  Leaf a  |  Tree a :^: Tree a

the derived instance of Read in Haskell 2010 is equivalent to

instance (Read a) => Read (Tree a) where

        readsPrec d r =  readParen (d > app_prec)
                         (\r -> [(Leaf m,t) |
                                 ("Leaf",s) <- lex r,
                                 (m,t) <- readsPrec (app_prec+1) s]) r

                      ++ readParen (d > up_prec)
                         (\r -> [(u:^:v,w) |
                                 (u,s) <- readsPrec (up_prec+1) r,
                                 (":^:",t) <- lex s,
                                 (v,w) <- readsPrec (up_prec+1) t]) r

          where app_prec = 10
                up_prec = 5

Note that right-associativity of :^: is unused.

The derived instance in GHC is equivalent to

instance (Read a) => Read (Tree a) where

        readPrec = parens $ (prec app_prec $ do
                                 Ident "Leaf" <- lexP
                                 m <- step readPrec
                                 return (Leaf m))

                     +++ (prec up_prec $ do
                                 u <- step readPrec
                                 Symbol ":^:" <- lexP
                                 v <- step readPrec
                                 return (u :^: v))

          where app_prec = 10
                up_prec = 5

        readListPrec = readListPrecDefault

The Functor class is used for types that can be mapped over. Instances of Functor should satisfy the following laws:

fmap id  ==  id
fmap (f . g)  ==  fmap f . fmap g

The instances of Functor for lists, Maybe and IO satisfy these laws.

The Monad class defines the basic operations over a monad, a concept from a branch of mathematics known as category theory. From the perspective of a Haskell programmer, however, it is best to think of a monad as an abstract datatype of actions. Haskell's do expressions provide a convenient syntax for writing monadic expressions.

Minimal complete definition: >>= and return.

Instances of Monad should satisfy the following laws:

return a >>= k  ==  k a
m >>= return  ==  m
m >>= (\x -> k x >>= h)  ==  (m >>= k) >>= h

Instances of both Monad and Functor should additionally satisfy the law:

fmap f xs  ==  xs >>= return . f

The instances of Monad for lists, Maybe and IO defined in the Prelude satisfy these laws.

Same as >>=, but with the arguments interchanged.

Class for string-like datastructures; used by the overloaded string extension (-XOverloadedStrings in GHC).

Basic numeric class.

Minimal complete definition: all except negate or (-)

Integral numbers, supporting integer division.

Minimal complete definition: quotRem and toInteger

Fractional numbers, supporting real division.

Minimal complete definition: fromRational and (recip or (/))

Trigonometric and hyperbolic functions and related functions.

Minimal complete definition: pi, exp, log, sin, cos, sinh, cosh, asin, acos, atan, asinh, acosh and atanh

Extracting components of fractions.

Minimal complete definition: properFraction

Efficient, machine-independent access to the components of a floating-point number.

Minimal complete definition: all except exponent, significand, scaleFloat and atan2

The Maybe type encapsulates an optional value. A value of type Maybe a either contains a value of type a (represented as Just a), or it is empty (represented as Nothing). Using Maybe is a good way to deal with errors or exceptional cases without resorting to drastic measures such as error.

The Maybe type is also a monad. It is a simple kind of error monad, where all errors are represented by Nothing. A richer error monad can be built using the Either type.

The character type Char is an enumeration whose values represent Unicode (or equivalently ISO/IEC 10646) characters (see http://www.unicode.org/ for details). This set extends the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set (the first 256 characters), which is itself an extension of the ASCII character set (the first 128 characters). A character literal in Haskell has type Char.

To convert a Char to or from the corresponding Int value defined by Unicode, use toEnum and fromEnum from the Enum class respectively (or equivalently ord and chr).

A value of type IO a is a computation which, when performed, does some I/O before returning a value of type a.

There is really only one way to "perform" an I/O action: bind it to Main.main in your program. When your program is run, the I/O will be performed. It isn't possible to perform I/O from an arbitrary function, unless that function is itself in the IO monad and called at some point, directly or indirectly, from Main.main.

IO is a monad, so IO actions can be combined using either the do-notation or the >> and >>= operations from the Monad class.

The Either type represents values with two possibilities: a value of type Either a b is either Left a or Right b.

The Either type is sometimes used to represent a value which is either correct or an error; by convention, the Left constructor is used to hold an error value and the Right constructor is used to hold a correct value (mnemonic: "right" also means "correct").

A space-efficient representation of a Word8 vector, supporting many efficient operations.

A ByteString contains 8-bit bytes, or by using the operations from Data.ByteString.Char8 it can be interpreted as containing 8-bit characters.

A Map from keys k to values a.

A map of integers to values a.

A set of values a.

A set of integers.

General-purpose finite sequences.

The member functions of this class facilitate writing values of primitive types to raw memory (which may have been allocated with the above mentioned routines) and reading values from blocks of raw memory. The class, furthermore, includes support for computing the storage requirements and alignment restrictions of storable types.

Memory addresses are represented as values of type Ptr a, for some a which is an instance of class Storable. The type argument to Ptr helps provide some valuable type safety in FFI code (you can't mix pointers of different types without an explicit cast), while helping the Haskell type system figure out which marshalling method is needed for a given pointer.

All marshalling between Haskell and a foreign language ultimately boils down to translating Haskell data structures into the binary representation of a corresponding data structure of the foreign language and vice versa. To code this marshalling in Haskell, it is necessary to manipulate primitive data types stored in unstructured memory blocks. The class Storable facilitates this manipulation on all types for which it is instantiated, which are the standard basic types of Haskell, the fixed size Int types (Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64), the fixed size Word types (Word8, Word16, Word32, Word64), StablePtr, all types from Foreign.C.Types, as well as Ptr.

Minimal complete definition: sizeOf, alignment, one of peek, peekElemOff and peekByteOff, and one of poke, pokeElemOff and pokeByteOff.

A Word is an unsigned integral type, with the same size as Int.

8-bit unsigned integer type