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

Operators as functions


What is an operator, thinking abstractly? It can be seen as a function of one or two arguments that just have a concise name represented by a single symbol or a very few symbols. F# heartily supports this abstraction. For example, take a look at the following expression:

(%) 10 3 = 10 % 3 

Here, on the left-hand side of the equality sign (=), the (%) function is called with the arguments 10 and 3. On the right-hand side of the equality sign (=) just a 10 % 3 expression is present. Evaluating the whole expression in FSI shows its value as true because sub expressions on the left and right of the equality sign (=) are indeed identical.

Furthermore, the equality sign (=) itself is also an operator. Evaluating the equality sign (=) itself in FSI with the following expression (=);; will reveal the following function signature:

('a -> 'a -> bool) when 'a : equality 

The preceding signature means that (=) is simply a function that takes two arguments of generic type 'a...