Concept:
Algebraic data type
Headline
A type for the construction of terms
Illustration
Algebraic data types are typically supported by functional programming languages. For instance, Language:Haskell, Language:Scala, and Language:SML support algebraic data types. Illustrations are given here for Language:Haskell.
A data type for shapes can be defined as follows:
data Shape = Circle Float
| Rectangle Float Float
The data contructor Circle serves for the representation of circles; the one and only constructor component serves for the radius. The data constructor Rectangle serves for the representation of rectangles; the two constructor components serve for width and height.
Constructors can be used as functions to construct terms:
myCircle :: Shape
myCircle = Circle 42
myRectangle :: Shape
myRectangle = Rectangle 77 88
In fact, constructors are functions with the types of the constructor components as argument types and the type of algebraic data type as the result type:
> :t Circle
Circle :: Float -> Shape
> :t Rectangle
Rectangle :: Float -> Float -> Shape
Pattern matching can be applied to terms of algebraic data types:
-- Test whether the shape is a circle
isCircle (Circle _) = True
isCircle (Rectangle _ _) = False
See Contribution:haskellData for a more profound illustration of algebraic data types.
All predefined, compound types of Haskell are essentially algebraic data types. For instance, Haskell's Booleans could be defined by an algebraic data type with two data constructors as follows:
data Bool = True | False
Haskell's lists could be defined by an algebraic data type with two construtors as follows:
data List a = Nil | Cons a (List a)
The constructors Nil and Cons are meant to correspond to the empty list and ":" of Haskell's built-in lists. The Nil constructor has no constructor component, whereas the Cons constructor has two constructor components.
See also Maybe types for yet another illustration of algebraic data types.
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Ralf Lämmel
edited this article at
Sun, 02 Sep 2018 22:28:36 +0200
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