3.11  List

3.11 List

A list is a compound data type with a variable number of terms.

[Term1,...,TermN]

Each term Term in the list is called an element. The number of elements is said to be the length of the list.

Formally, a list is either the empty list [] or consists of a head (first element) and a tail (remainder of the list). The tail is also a list. The latter can be expressed as [H|T]. The notation [Term1,…,TermN] above is equivalent with the list [Term1|[…|[TermN|[]]]].

Example:

[] is a list, thus [c|[]] is a list, thus [b|[c|[]]] is a list, thus [a|[b|[c|[]]]] is a list, or in short [a,b,c]

A list where the tail is a list is sometimes called a proper list. It is allowed to have a list where the tail is not a list, for example, [a|b]. However, this type of list is of little practical use.

Examples:

1> L1 = [a,2,{c,4}].
[a,2,{c,4}]
2> [H|T] = L1.
[a,2,{c,4}]
3> H.
a
4> T.
[2,{c,4}]
5> L2 = [d|T].
[d,2,{c,4}]
6> length(L1).
3
7> length([]).
0

A collection of list processing functions can be found in the lists manual page in STDLIB.