Haskell Solutions to the Language Session Problems at the 1988 Salishan High-Speed Computing Conference

Abstract

Haskell is a new functional language, named after the logician Haskell B. Curry that was designed by a 15-member international committee representative of the functional programming research community. The committee was formed because it was felt that research and application of modern functional languages was being hampered by the lack of a common language. Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language exhibiting many of the recent innovations in programming language research, including higher-order functions, non-strict functions and data structures, static polymorphic typing, user-definable algebraic data types, pattern-matching, list comprehensions, a module system, and a rich set of primitive data types, including arbitrary and fixed precision integers and complex, rational, and floating-point numbers. In addition, it has several novel features that give it additional expressiveness, including an elegant form of overloading using a notion of type classes, a flexible I/O system that unifies the two most popular functional I/O models and an array data type that allows purely functional, monolithic arrays to be constructed using array comprehensions.