§ 3.18. List data type

Lists and the associated functions are commonly used data structures in ML. List processing programs contain the following basic elements in ML programming.

• Recursively defined data.

• Pattern matching.

• Polymorphic functions

Let us lean these elements through list programming.

A list is a sequence of elements. In ML, a list of 1,2,3 is written as follows.

# [1,2,3];
val it = [1, 2, 3] : int list

This notation is a shorthand for the following expression.

# 1::2::3::nil;
val it = [1, 2, 3] : int list

:: is a right-associative binary operator for constructing a list. So 1::2::3::nil is interpreted as 1::(2::(3::nil)). e :: L is the list obtained by prepending the element e to the list L. nil is the empty list. int list is the list type whose component is type int.