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

There are a number of Haskell heap implementations in an appendix to Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures. (The source code can be downloaded at the link. The book itself is well worth reading.) None of them are binary heaps, per se, but the "leftist" heap is very similar. It has O(log n) insertion, removal, and merge operations. There are also more complicated data structures like skew heaps, binomial heaps, and splay heaps which have better performance.