Headline

A higher-order function to apply an argument function to all elements of a list

Illustration

Let's map over a given list of numbers to increment them. In Language:Haskell, we would use the map function as follows:

>  map (+1) [1,2,3,4,5]
[2,3,4,5,6]

That is, map is applied to a function and a list; map returns a list of the same length as the input list which each element "transformed" by the argument function. The higher-order function map can be defined as follows:

-- Define map via pattern matching
map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map f [] = []
map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs

For what it matters, the map function could also be defined in terms of the fold function, thereby reusing a recursion scheme as opposed to the explicitly recursive definition above.

-- Define map via foldr
map' :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map' f = foldr ((:) . f) []

Further, we can also define the map function in terms of list comprehension; in this manner we hint at the meaning of list comprehensions because, in fact, list comprehensions correspond to syntactic sugar whose elimination also involves the Map function.

-- Define map via list comprehension
map'' :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map'' f xs = [ f x | x <- xs ]

Conceptually, map functions are not limited to lists; they make sense for algebraic data types in general. List-like maps can be generalized to functors.


Ralf Lämmel edited this article at Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:40:57 +0200
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