Book Image

Haskell Design Patterns

By : Tikhon Jelvis, Ryan Lemmer
Book Image

Haskell Design Patterns

By: Tikhon Jelvis, Ryan Lemmer

Overview of this book

Design patterns and idioms can widen our perspective by showing us where to look, what to look at, and ultimately how to see what we are looking at. At their best, patterns are a shorthand method of communicating better ways to code (writing less, more maintainable, and more efficient code) This book starts with Haskell 98 and through the lens of patterns and idioms investigates the key advances and programming styles that together make "modern Haskell". Your journey begins with the three pillars of Haskell. Then you'll experience the problem with Lazy I/O, together with a solution. You'll also trace the hierarchy formed by Functor, Applicative, Arrow, and Monad. Next you'll explore how Fold and Map are generalized by Foldable and Traversable, which in turn is unified in a broader context by functional Lenses. You'll delve more deeply into the Type system, which will prepare you for an overview of Generic programming. In conclusion you go to the edge of Haskell by investigating the Kind system and how this relates to Dependently-typed programming
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 2. Patterns for I/O

 

"I believe that the monadic approach to programming, in which actions are first class values, is itself interesting, beautiful and modular. In short, Haskell is the world's finest imperative programming language"

 
 --Tackling the Awkward Squad, Simon Peyton Jones

It is remarkable that we can do side-effecting I/O in a pure functional language!

We start this chapter by establishing I/O as a first-class citizen of Haskell. The bulk of this chapter is concerned with exploring three styles of I/O programming in Haskell.

We start with the most naïve style: imperative style. From there, we move on to the elegant and concise "lazy I/O", only to run into its severe limitations. The way out is the third and last style we explore: iteratee I/O.

As a binding thread, we carry a simple I/O example through all three styles. We will cover the following topics:

  • I/O as a first-class citizen

  • Imperative I/O

  • Lazy I/O

  • The problem with Lazy I/O

  • Resource management with bracket

  • Iteratee I/O