Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By : Gene Belitski
Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By: Gene Belitski

Overview of this book

Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 10. Type Augmentation and Generic Computations

To this point in the book, it was easy to notice the direct link between the use pattern and the correspondent language feature. For example, Chapter 5, Algebraic Data Types, clearly showed that the native F# algebraic types are substitutes for custom classes. Increased quality and speed of implementations based on algebraic data types reflect the payoff for the feature use.

In this chapter, I will consider a certain language features that do not make the payoff from their use obvious. Nevertheless, these features are ubiquitous in F#. I mean the ambivalent pair of code generalization against the code specialization.

We are going to cover the following topics:

  • Code generalization techniques, or making the same functional code applicable to multiple function argument types

  • Code specialization techniques, or making the functional code more specific than usually may be achieved by using standard features

Each of the preceding patterns carries...