Book Image

Haskell Cookbook

Book Image

Haskell Cookbook

Overview of this book

Haskell is a purely functional language that has the great ability to develop large and difficult, but easily maintainable software. Haskell Cookbook provides recipes that start by illustrating the principles of functional programming in Haskell, and then gradually build up your expertise in creating industrial-strength programs to accomplish any goal. The book covers topics such as Functors, Applicatives, Monads, and Transformers. You will learn various ways to handle state in your application and explore advanced topics such as Generalized Algebraic Data Types, higher kind types, existential types, and type families. The book will discuss the association of lenses with type classes such as Functor, Foldable, and Traversable to help you manage deep data structures. With the help of the wide selection of examples in this book, you will be able to upgrade your Haskell programming skills and develop scalable software idiomatically.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introduction

In the last chapter, we looked at functions, recursions, and higher order functions. In this chapter, we will look at another important aspect of the Haskell language. The data types in Haskell are very expressive and are used to express very intuitive data structures. We have seen that Haskell works by reducing or computing the values from expressions (which are formed by applying functions to values and so on). For each value, there is some type associated with it. In fact, we can also say that each type represents a collection or a set of values.

In this chapter, we will look at basic algebraic types. The term algebraic type came from the association between the values of a type and algebraic operations such as sum and product. We will also look at recursively defined types, where the type is included in the definition of the type itself. We will also look at...