What is 'Haskell'?

Haskell is a purely functional, strongly typed, general purpose programming language. It is a very high-level language and is very powerful. In other words, you can express a lot of functionality in very few lines of code. And unlike some powerful scripting languages, this brevity is not at the expense of generality or elegance.

Proponents of Haskell argue that it is much quicker to develop Haskell code than the equivalent code in other more conventional languages. Not only that, the developed code contains fewer bugs too. Haskell is a declarative language and is very rigorous. In fact it is so rigorous that when developing in Haskell, one acquires the feeling that if the program is accepted by the compiler, then it is probably correct. For these reasons, Haskell code is considered close to being an executable specification.

You can find out more about Haskell from the web site at www.haskell.org.

Other Terms