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catamorphism
Sign in to saveIn functional programming, the concept of catamorphism (from the Ancient Greek: "downwards" and "form, shape") denotes the unique homomorphism from an initial algebra into some other algebra.
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- category theory
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Encyclopedic overview
11 sectionsContents
- Definition
- Terminology and history
- Examples
- Catamorphism for Maybe-algebra
- List fold
- Tree fold
- General case
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
In functional programming, the concept of catamorphism (from the Ancient Greek: "downwards" and "form, shape") denotes the unique homomorphism from an initial algebra into some other algebra.
Catamorphisms provide generalizations of folds of lists to arbitrary algebraic data types, which can be described as initial algebras. The dual concept is that of anamorphism that generalize unfolds. A hylomorphism is the composition of an anamorphism followed by a catamorphism.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “catamorphism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
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