C.2 Introduction
Haskell is named after Haskell B. Curry, the pioneer of the Y combinator in λ-calculus—the mathematical theory of functions on which functional programming is based. Haskell is a useful general-purpose programming language in that it incorporates functional features from Lisp, rule-based programming (i.e., pattern matching) from Prolog, a terse syntax, and data abstraction from Smalltalk and C++. Haskell is a (nearly) pure functional language with some declarative features including pattern-directed invocation, guards, list comprehensions, and mathematical notation. It is an ideal vehicle through which to explore lazy evaluation, type safety, type inference, and currying. The objective here, however, is elementary programming ...
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