Non empty list

Haskell is well known for its safety. A well-typed Haskell program never goes wrong. Is it true? Unfortunately, no. The type system of Haskell is great and it does catch many bugs at compile time, but Haskell’s Prelude is full of partial functions.

For example, head and tail functions of Data.List throws an error when an empty list is given as an argument.

λ> head []
*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

That’s why we have a separate safe package which provides alternative safe functions such as headMay and tailMay.

λ> headMay []
Nothing
it :: Maybe a

What if you know that your list is never empty? Checking the return value of headMay or tailMay soon becomes cumbersome.

Fortunately, Haskell Prelude provides NonEmpty data type which guarantees that the list is not empty. You can use head and tail functions without worrying about the partiality. It also provides many list functions such as map, reverse and length.

infixr 5 :|, <|
data NonEmpty a = a :| [a]

head :: NonEmpty a -> a