Haskell Cookbook

Map function

In the recipe, we have implemented map in two ways. Both implementations are described here as follows:

• The map function is defined as map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs. Here, the mapping function f is applied to the first element, and then we will recurse using the remaining list and then join the result. Suppose the input list is [1,2,3,4,5], and we apply f to it. Then, our map will work in the following way. (Note that the function f is categorically not defined concretely to simplify the explanation of map.) As you can see, the result list keeps expanding towards the right (for example, f 1 : <rest of the list expanded here>):

        map f [1,2,3,4,5] = f 1 : map f [2,3,4,5]                  = f 1 : (f 2 : map f [3,4,5]) = f 1 : (f 2 : (f 3 : map ...