Pronunciation
There was a thread on Haskell-Cafe about how to pronounce Haskell.
Below are some notes for beginners on how to pronounce those strange Haskell operators and 'read' Haskell programs.
This is meant to be a table with formal and informal ways of saying various operators and code snippets.
| Symbol | Pronunciation | References | |
|---|---|---|---|
::
|
has type (in definitions); at type (in expressions or patterns) | ||
->
|
maps to, to | ||
=
|
is | ||
==
|
equals | Prelude | |
/=
|
not equals | Prelude | |
=>
|
is a witness for, implies | Type Classes and Overloading | |
.
|
dot (could be used anywhere, but especially in, for example, Data.Char.ord), ring, compose (for example, negate . (+1)), (silent) (for example, forall a. (Num a) => a) | ||
<-
|
drawn from, from | ||
-<
|
arrow application | Arrows syntax | |
&&&
|
both, fanout | Control.Arrow | |
|||
|
either, fanin | Control.Arrow | |
++
|
append | Prelude | |
>>=
|
bind | About monads, Monads as containers | |
>>
|
then, sequence | Prelude | |
<*>
|
applied over | Applicative Functors | |
<|>
|
or/alternative | [1] | |
\
|
lambda | Lambda abstraction, Haskell 98 Report | |
!
|
bang; strict (in patterns or data definitions); index (in expressions) | The GHC Users Guide has a section on Bang Patterns. | |
~
|
irrefutable, lazy (in patterns) | ||
:
|
cons | ||
[]
|
nil | ||
()
|
unit | ||
(,)
|
2-tuple, pair | ||
(a,b,c)
|
[3-]tuple [of] a, b, and c | ||
({)}
|
just as inconvenient to convey grouping verbally, whether it's layout or punctuation |
| Example | Pronunciation |
|---|---|
f :: Int -> Int
|
f has type Int to Int |
Thoughts on improving this page:
The tables above would be best split into more columns to distinguish Informal, possibly bad suggestions like "then", "is", "gets", from Formal correct ways of saying the same thing. The Symbols could also be named in a literal way in another column, such as "arrow" or "double-colon". The Description column can be quite brief and a link provided to the relevant wiki page for the operator.
Some words, particularly the informal ones, may be good for several different symbols, but these can hopefully be arranged so that their context will make them unambiguous when reading a code snippet.