[Haskell-beginners] How to process a list that contains "undefined" values?
David Place
d at vidplace.com
Sat Jul 2 17:25:51 CEST 2011
On Jul 2, 2011, at 11:04 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> The type tells you this right out, by the way:
>
>> undefined :: a
>
> What can you do with a "value" that can be any conceivable type, and
> about which nothing else can be said? It has no handles, no behavior;
> the only possible interpretation is that it's not a value at all.
Its type makes undefined valuable in creating polymorphic functions. You can see many examples of it in my article for the Monad.Reader:
"How to refold a map."
> http://www.haskell.org/wikiupload/6/6a/TMR-Issue11.pdf
"undefined" is rendered by the symbol for "bottom" in the formatted code.
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d at vidplace.com
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