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

Grouping patterns


Pattern match cases I've covered until this point can be composed together in a manner that resembles the terms of a Boolean expression with OR (|) and AND (&) operators. Let me demonstrate this technique by implementing a function that accepts two string arguments that represent keys and validates that both the given values are non-empty, providing a detailed diagnostics.

You should be able to grasp at this point why I should begin the matching with the most specific case when both the keys are empty. The next less specific match is represented by two symmetric cases when either the first or the second key is empty. Here, in order to demonstrate the flexibility provided by F# patterns grouping, I combine these two patterns with Boolean OR and at the same time capture key values into the local context with a variable pattern represented by the tuple (x,y). For the most generic leftover case, I know that both keys are not empty, so just a variable pattern is sufficient...