Book Image

Mastering F#

By : Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad
Book Image

Mastering F#

By: Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad

Overview of this book

F# is a multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and is supported both by industry-leading companies who provide professional tools and by an active open community, F# is rapidly gaining popularity as it emerges in digital music advertising, creating music-focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web. This book will guide you through the basics and will then help you master F#. The book starts by explaining how to use F# with Visual Studio, file ordering, and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage. It moves on to explain the functional core of F# such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, and lazy evaluation. Next, the book takes you through imperative and asynchronous programming, F# type providers, applications, and testing in F#. Finally, we look into using F# with distributed programming and using F# as a suitable language for data science. In short, this book will help you learn F# for real-world applications and increase your productivity with functional programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Object-oriented programming


F# provides object-oriented programming (OOP) with relative ease. It is a first class functional language, as we have seen up until now and a first class OOP language as well. To be able to mix both the paradigms is a very powerful tool. We can easily extend .NET types that were implemented in other languages easily with F#. The main features of OOP are as follows:

  • Encapsulation: Objects can hide information (code and data) about themselves to prevent unexpected modifications from other objects
  • Inheritance: The definition of one type of object (a class) can be reused by a new definition that inherits the methods from the former class (its parent) and can extend them
  • Polymorphism: Methods expecting arguments of a certain class can also accept descendants of that class

Defining a class

The simplest form of a class definition looks like a definition of an object with the following keyword:

    type <class name><constructor arguments> =  
        [class] 
 ...