[Haskell-beginners] represent data sturcture using function

Raeck chiu raeck at msn.com
Mon Dec 29 00:04:28 EST 2008


Merry Christmas!
Hope everybody is enjoying the Christmas!

I am doing some readings and I found something seems to be interesting.

People sometime will try to represent a quantity-regard-only data structure
(such a order-regadless List) using functions instead of ta concrete data
structure (like the haskell build-in []), any particular reason for this?

For example,
> data Sex = Male | Female
> classA :: Sex -> Int
> classA Male = 100
> classA Female = 200

when I should prefer the above solution instead of using a concrete data structure
such as [] to represent the classA members?

It seems to be very difficult to change the number of Male or Female if a concrete data
structure is not used. Is it possible change the number of Male in classA when represent
classA using function?

Thank you very much!

Best wishes,
Raeck


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