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Haskell is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language known for its advanced features and academic origins. It is named after logician Haskell Curry, whose work in mathematical logic provides a foundation for functional languages.

Key characteristics of Haskell include:

Purely Functional: Functions in Haskell are "pure," meaning they always produce the same output for the same input and have no side effects (they do not modify external state or cause observable changes outside their return value). This promotes predictability and easier reasoning about code.

Statically Typed: Haskell is statically typed, meaning the types of values are known and checked at compile time. This helps catch errors early and improves code reliability.

Type Inference: While statically typed, Haskell features strong type inference, allowing the compiler to deduce the types of variables and functions in many cases, reducing the need for explicit type declarations.

Lazy Evaluation: Haskell employs lazy evaluation, meaning expressions are only evaluated when their values are actually needed. This can lead to more efficient programs and enables working with infinite data structures.

Immutability: All data in Haskell is immutable by default, meaning once a value is created, it cannot be changed. This simplifies concurrency and helps prevent unintended side effects.

Type Classes: Haskell pioneered the concept of type classes, which provide a systematic way to achieve ad-hoc polymorphism (operator overloading) in a type-safe manner.

Built-in Concurrency and Parallelism: Haskell is used in both academia and industry for a wide range of applications, including compilers, interpreters, web services, and data synchronization engines. Its main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which also includes an interpreter.