What is Haskell?
Haskell is a modern, standard, non-strict, purely-functional programming language. It provides all the features sketched above, including polymorphic typing, lazy evaluation and higher-order functions. It also has an innovative type system which supports a systematic form of overloading and a module system. It is specifically designed to handle a wide range of applications, from numerical through to symbolic. To this end, Haskell has an expressive syntax, and a rich variety of built-in data types, including arbitrary-precision integers and rationals, as well as the more conventional integer, floating-point and boolean types. There are a number of compilers and interpreters available. All are free. First-time users may want to start with Hugs, a small, portable Haskell interpreter.
