Haskell Cookbook

Head and tail of a list

From the definition of a list, any element, when prepended to a list, is also a list. For example, 1:[2,3] is also a list. Here, 1 is called the head of the list, and 2 is called the tail of the list.

The functions head and tail return head and tail, respectively, of the list. The snippets 6 and 7 show an example of head and tail. Head has a signature - head :: [a] -> a and tail has a signature :: [a] -> [a] .