Module

Prim

The Prim module is embedded in the PureScript compiler in order to provide compiler support for certain types — for example, value literals, or syntax sugar. It is implicitly imported unqualified in every module except those that list it as a qualified import.

Prim does not include additional built-in types and kinds that are defined deeper in the compiler. For example, row kinds (e.g. # Type, which is the kind of types such as (name :: String, age :: Int)), Type wildcards (e.g. f :: _ -> Int), and Quantified Types. Rather, these are documented in the PureScript language reference.

#Function 

data Function :: Type -> Type -> Type

A function, which takes values of the type specified by the first type parameter, and returns values of the type specified by the second. In the JavaScript backend, this is a standard JavaScript Function.

The type constructor (->) is syntactic sugar for this type constructor. It is recommended to use (->) rather than Function, where possible.

That is, prefer this:

f :: Number -> Number

to either of these:

f :: Function Number Number
f :: (->) Number Number

#Array 

data Array :: Type -> Type

An Array: a data structure supporting efficient random access. In the JavaScript backend, values of this type are represented as JavaScript Arrays at runtime.

Construct values using literals:

x = [1,2,3,4,5] :: Array Int

#Record 

data Record :: # Type -> Type

The type of records whose fields are known at compile time. In the JavaScript backend, values of this type are represented as JavaScript Objects at runtime.

The type signature here means that the Record type constructor takes a row of concrete types. For example:

type Person = Record (name :: String, age :: Number)

The syntactic sugar with curly braces { } is generally preferred, though:

type Person = { name :: String, age :: Number }

The row associates a type to each label which appears in the record.

Technical note: PureScript allows duplicate labels in rows, and the meaning of Record r is based on the first occurrence of each label in the row r.

#Number 

data Number :: Type

A double precision floating point number (IEEE 754).

Construct values of this type with literals:

y = 35.23 :: Number
z = 1.224e6 :: Number

#Int 

data Int :: Type

A 32-bit signed integer. See the purescript-integers package for details of how this is accomplished when compiling to JavaScript.

Construct values of this type with literals:

x = 23 :: Int

#String 

data String :: Type

A String. As in JavaScript, String values represent sequences of UTF-16 code units, which are not required to form a valid encoding of Unicode text (for example, lone surrogates are permitted).

Construct values of this type with literals, using double quotes ":

x = "hello, world" :: String

Multi-line string literals are also supported with triple quotes (""").

#Char 

data Char :: Type

A single character (UTF-16 code unit). The JavaScript representation is a normal String, which is guaranteed to contain one code unit. This means that astral plane characters (i.e. those with code point values greater than 0xFFFF) cannot be represented as Char values.

Construct values of this type with literals, using single quotes ':

x = 'a' :: Char

#Boolean 

data Boolean :: Type

A JavaScript Boolean value.

Construct values of this type with the literals true and false.

#Partial 

class Partial

The Partial type class is used to indicate that a function is partial, that is, it is not defined for all inputs. In practice, attempting to use a partial function with a bad input will usually cause an error to be thrown, although it is not safe to assume that this will happen in all cases. For more information, see purescript-partial.

#Type 

kind Type

Type is the kind of all proper types: those that classify value-level terms. For example the type Boolean has kind Type; denoted by Boolean :: Type.

#Symbol 

kind Symbol

Symbol is the kind of type-level strings.

Construct types of this kind using the same literal syntax as documented for strings.

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