Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Dr. Fatih Nayebi
Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Dr. Fatih Nayebi

Overview of this book

Swift is a multi-paradigm programming language enabling you to tackle different problems in various ways. Understanding each paradigm and knowing when and how to utilize and combine them can lead to a better code base. Functional programming (FP) is an important paradigm that empowers us with declarative development and makes applications more suitable for testing, as well as performant and elegant. This book aims to simplify the FP paradigms, making them easily understandable and usable, by showing you how to solve many of your day-to-day development problems using Swift FP. It starts with the basics of FP, and you will go through all the core concepts of Swift and the building blocks of FP. You will also go through important aspects, such as function composition and currying, custom operator definition, monads, functors, applicative functors,memoization, lenses, algebraic data types, type erasure, functional data structures, functional reactive programming (FRP), and protocol-oriented programming(POP). You will then learn to combine those techniques to develop a fully functional iOS application from scratch
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

The flatMap method


flatMap is a generic instance method for any type that conforms to Sequence protocol. It can be used to flatten one level of a dimension of a sequence or to remove nil values in the sequence. The following example presents a two-dimensional array, in other words, nested arrays.

Calling flatMap on this array reduces one dimension and flattens it so the resulting array becomes [1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6]:

let twoDimArray = [[1, 3, 5], [2, 4, 6]] 
let oneDimArray = twoDimArray.flatMap { $0 } 

In this example, flatMap returns an array containing the concatenated results of the mapping transform over itself. We can achieve the same result by calling joined on our array and then map, as follows:

let oneDimArray = twoDimArray.joined().map { $0 } 

To be able to transform each element in an array, we will need to provide a map method as the closure to the flatMap method as follows:

let transofrmedOneDimArray = twoDimArray.flatMap { $0.map { $0 + 2 } } 

The result will be [3, 5, 7, 4, 6, 8].

The...