Efficient heaps in purely functional languages

Question

As an exercise in Haskell, I'm trying to implement heapsort. The heap is usually implemented as an array in imperative languages, but this would be hugely inefficient in purely functional languages. So I've looked at binary heaps, but everything I found so far describes them from an imperative viewpoint and the algorithms presented are hard to translate to a functional setting. How to efficiently implement a heap in a purely functional language such as Haskell?

Edit: By efficient I mean it should still be in O(n*log n), but it doesn't have to beat a C program. Also, I'd like to use purely functional programming. What else would be the point of doing it in Haskell?

Answer 1

Jon Fairbairn posted a functional heapsort to the Haskell Cafe mailing list back in 1997:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg01788.html

I reproduce it below, reformatted to fit this space. I've also slightly simplified the code of merge_heap.

I'm surprised treefold isn't in the standard prelude since it's so useful. Translated from the version I wrote in Ponder in October 1992 -- Jon Fairbairn

module Treefold where

-- treefold (*) z [a,b,c,d,e,f] = (((a*b)*(c*d))*(e*f))
treefold f zero [] = zero
treefold f zero [x] = x
treefold f zero (a:b:l) = treefold f zero (f a b : pairfold l)
    where 
        pairfold (x:y:rest) = f x y : pairfold rest
        pairfold l = l -- here l will have fewer than 2 elements


module Heapsort where
import Treefold

data Heap a = Nil | Node a [Heap a]
heapify x = Node x []

heapsort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]    
heapsort = flatten_heap . merge_heaps . map heapify    
    where 
        merge_heaps :: Ord a => [Heap a] -> Heap a
        merge_heaps = treefold merge_heap Nil

        flatten_heap Nil = []
        flatten_heap (Node x heaps) = x:flatten_heap (merge_heaps heaps)

        merge_heap heap Nil = heap
        merge_heap node_a@(Node a heaps_a) node_b@(Node b heaps_b)
            | a < b = Node a (node_b: heaps_a)
            | otherwise = Node b (node_a: heaps_b)

Answer 2

You could also use the ST monad, which allows you to write imperative code but expose a purely functional interface safely.

Answer 3

Just like in efficient Quicksort algorithms written in Haskell, you need to use monads (state transformers) to do stuff in-place.