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

Answer 1

As an exercise in Haskell, I implemented an imperative heapsort with the ST Monad.

{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}

import Control.Monad (forM, forM_)
import Control.Monad.ST (ST, runST)
import Data.Array.MArray (newListArray, readArray, writeArray)
import Data.Array.ST (STArray)
import Data.STRef (newSTRef, readSTRef, writeSTRef)

heapSort :: forall a. Ord a => [a] -> [a]
heapSort list = runST $ do
  let n = length list
  heap <- newListArray (1, n) list :: ST s (STArray s Int a)
  heapSizeRef <- newSTRef n
  let
    heapifyDown pos = do
      val <- readArray heap pos
      heapSize <- readSTRef heapSizeRef
      let children = filter (<= heapSize) [pos*2, pos*2+1]      
      childrenVals <- forM children $ \i -> do
        childVal <- readArray heap i
        return (childVal, i)
      let (minChildVal, minChildIdx) = minimum childrenVals
      if null children || val < minChildVal
        then return ()
        else do
          writeArray heap pos minChildVal
          writeArray heap minChildIdx val
          heapifyDown minChildIdx
    lastParent = n `div` 2
  forM_ [lastParent,lastParent-1..1] heapifyDown
  forM [n,n-1..1] $ \i -> do
    top <- readArray heap 1
    val <- readArray heap i
    writeArray heap 1 val
    writeSTRef heapSizeRef (i-1)
    heapifyDown 1
    return top

btw I contest that if it's not purely functional then there is no point in doing so in Haskell. I think my toy implementation is much nicer than what one would achieve in C++ with templates, passing around stuff to the inner functions.