Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

C.5 Essential Operators and Expressions

Haskell was designed to have a terse syntax. For instance, in what follows notice that a ; (semicolon) is almost never required in a Haskell program; the cons operator has been reduced from cons in Scheme to :: in ML to : in Haskell; and the reserved words define, lambda, |, and end do not appear in function declarations and definitions. While programs written in a functional style are already generally more concise than their imperative analogs, “[a]lthough it is difficult to make an objective comparison, Haskell programs are often between two and ten times shorter than programs written in other current languages” (Hutton 2007, p. 4).

• Character conversions. The ord and chr functions in the Data.Char ...