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

Chapter 8. Functional Data Structures

We are familiar with imperative data structures. In fact, there are lots of references to imperative data structures in different programming languages. In contrast, there aren't many references to declarative data structures or functional data structures. This is because FP languages are not as mainstream as imperative programming languages. Additionally, designing and implementing functional data structures is more difficult in comparison to imperative counterparts because of the following reasons:

  • Mutability is not recommended in FP
  • Functional data structures are expected to be more flexible than their imperative counterparts

Imperative data structures rely heavily on mutability and assignments and making them immutable needs extra development effort. Whenever we change an imperative data structure, we basically override the previous version; however, this is not the case with declarative programming as we expect that both the previous and new versions...