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Note that fmap, join, append and bind are well-defined, since they're applied to progressively deeper arguments at each recursive call. The list type is an additive monad, with nil as the monadic zero and append as monadic sum. Lists form a monoid under the append operation. The identity element of the monoid is the empty list, nil.
Following Lisp, other high-level programming languages which feature linked lists as primitive data structures have adopted an append. To append lists, as an operator, Haskell uses ++, OCaml uses @. Other languages use the + or ++ symbols to nondestructively concatenate a string, list, or array.
The list handle should then be a pointer to the last data node, before the sentinel, if the list is not empty; or to the sentinel itself, if the list is empty. The same trick can be used to simplify the handling of a doubly linked linear list, by turning it into a circular doubly linked list with a single sentinel node.
Folds can be regarded as consistently replacing the structural components of a data structure with functions and values. Lists, for example, are built up in many functional languages from two primitives: any list is either an empty list, commonly called nil ([]), or is constructed by prefixing an element in front of another list, creating what is called a cons node ( Cons(X1,Cons(X2,Cons ...
This order is usually determined by the order in which the elements are added to the structure, but the elements can be rearranged in some contexts, such as sorting a list. For a structure that isn't ordered, on the other hand, no assumptions can be made about the ordering of the elements (although a physical implementation of these data types ...
The code above specifies a list of strings to be either empty, or a structure that contains a string and a list of strings. The self-reference in the definition permits the construction of lists of any (finite) number of strings. Another example of inductive definition is the natural numbers (or positive integers):
These include the structure of finite lists, which can be generated by two operations: Empty constructs an empty list, Cons(x, L) constructs a list by prepending or concatenating value x in front of list L. A list such as [1, 2, 3] is therefore the declaration Cons(1, Cons(2, Cons(3, Empty))). It is possible to describe the location in such a ...
The prototypical append-only data structure is the log file. Log-structured data structures found in Log-structured file systems and databases work in a similar way: every change (transaction) that happens to the data is logged by the program, and on retrieval the program must combine the pieces of data found in this log file. [ 9 ]