programming with types

» 23 Jan 2015

One of the things that really grows on you after programming with Haskell for a while is the idea that the types alone actually reveal quite a lot about what a program does. The implementation is almost a secondary concern.

To a programmer who has worked in side-effecting languages their whole life, it’s very unnerving to learn that the most common way to search the Haskell documentation is with a type signature. It’s arguably even more disconcerting to see something as terse as this in the official documentation:

const :: a -> b -> a
base Prelude, base Data.Function

Constant function.

Uh… cool. So what does const actually do?

Generics are very generic

To understand how to read type signatures, you first have to realise that generic arguments are precisely that: they are generic. Haskell has no class hierarchy because it’s not an OOP language. In Java, since all types inherit from Object, at a minimum you can always call toString() on a generic type, like so:

<A> void foo(A a) {

In Haskell, absolutely nothing is known about a generic type other than the fact that it is of that type. Trying to compile the Haskell equivalent of the Java above:

foo :: a -> IO ()
foo = print

results in a compile error:

No instance for (Show a)
  arising from a use of `print'
In the expression: print
In an equation for `foo': foo = print

You can’t even test for equality! This code snippet:

bar :: a -> Bool
bar x = x == x

also results in a compile error:

No instance for (Eq a)
  arising from a use of `=='
In the expression: x == x
In an equation for `bar': bar x = x == x

Show and Eq are examples of what is called a typeclass. On a high level, these are similar to interfaces in Java: for example, Show tells the Haskell compiler that show, the equivalent of Java’s toString, is available for that type. The only way to make these functions compile is to explicitly say that you expect the type a to have instances declared for the appropriate typeclass:

foo :: (Show a) => a -> IO ()
foo = print

bar :: (Eq a) => a -> Bool
bar x = x == x

These compile. The closest Java equivalent would be something like this:

<A extends Show> void foo(A a) {

The takeaway here is that Haskell is that strict about its types. If you don’t explicitly say that a generic type can do something, then the only operation you can perform on it is to return itself.

Arguments as the sole inputs

Next, you have to remember that Haskell is a pure language. That means that given the same inputs for a function, the output will always be the same, a property known as referential transparency (it’s actually slightly more complicated than that, but it’s close).

This, for example, means that global states are out. This Java function returns a different value every time it is called:

int bar = 0;
int foo(int a) {
    return a + bar++;

An equivalent can’t be implemented in Haskell, at least not with the same type signature. It is simply impossible.


That brings us directly to the most straightforward example, the id function:

id :: a -> a

By now you should be able to see why there can only ever be one implementation given this type signature. The implementation is simply:

id :: a -> a
id x = x

This is because there is no way to find a value of type a within the context of the function and because there are no operations that you can perform on a value of the generic type a.

Let’s move onto a slightly more complex example. Here is the type signature:

apply :: (a -> b) -> a -> b

So apply is function that takes two arguments: the first is a function that takes an a and returns a b, and the second is a value of type a. The apply function itself must return a value of type b. How can it get its hands on this value?

The only possible way is to call the function passed to it with the value that was also passed to it, leading to this implementation:

apply f x = f x

Those of you who have used Haskell will recognise this as the ($) operator.

By now the only implementation for the example I gave in the introduction should be apparent:

const :: a -> b -> a
const x _ = x

or, if you prefer:

const :: a -> b -> a
const x = \_ -> x

Through the magic of currying, const x returns a function that ignores its input and always produces the predefined constant result x.

Closing thoughts

And so on. The epiphany for me was the realisation that, given the constraints of the Haskell programming language, type signatures are in fact very unique.

I could look a signature like this


and understand immediately that the only productive implementation for this signature yields the map function. Or a signature like this:


and immediately see a fold function (foldr specifically in Haskell).

From experience I can say that it certainly takes some time to get used to reading and understanding functions in this manner. It’s a fundamental change in how you interpret code. But once you’ve made the connection and internalised this concept you don’t ever think about code in quite the same way again.