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 5.  Algebraic Data Types

In this chapter, I turn to the F# features that are (almost) missing among mainstream programming languages, such as C#, that are collectively referred to in computer science as algebraic data types (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type). They advance primitive data types to the higher type level with the help of the composition of other types (primitive or in-turn composite) which are as follows:

  • Tuples and records that represent product algebraic data types

  • Discriminated unions that represent sum algebraic types

I'll cover the same facets for each of these composite types as follows:

  • Type composition

  • Type equality and comparison

  • Type decomposition

  • Type augmentation

I will revisit the pattern matching as a type decomposition facility that can often be applied outside of the match construction.