Book Image

Haskell Design Patterns

By : Tikhon Jelvis, Ryan Lemmer
Book Image

Haskell Design Patterns

By: Tikhon Jelvis, Ryan Lemmer

Overview of this book

Design patterns and idioms can widen our perspective by showing us where to look, what to look at, and ultimately how to see what we are looking at. At their best, patterns are a shorthand method of communicating better ways to code (writing less, more maintainable, and more efficient code) This book starts with Haskell 98 and through the lens of patterns and idioms investigates the key advances and programming styles that together make "modern Haskell". Your journey begins with the three pillars of Haskell. Then you'll experience the problem with Lazy I/O, together with a solution. You'll also trace the hierarchy formed by Functor, Applicative, Arrow, and Monad. Next you'll explore how Fold and Map are generalized by Foldable and Traversable, which in turn is unified in a broader context by functional Lenses. You'll delve more deeply into the Type system, which will prepare you for an overview of Generic programming. In conclusion you go to the edge of Haskell by investigating the Kind system and how this relates to Dependently-typed programming
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

The sum of products style


To explore datatype-generic functions in the sum of products style, we'll return to the familiar List and Tree types:

  data List' a = Nil' | Cons' a (List' a)
      deriving (Show)

  data Tree a = Node a (Tree a) (Tree a)
          | Leaf a
            deriving (Show)

  aList = (Cons' 2 (Cons' 3 (Cons' 5 Nil')))
  intTree
    = Node 2 (Leaf 3)
             (Node 5 (Leaf 7)
                     (Leaf 11))

As a reference point, we define the datatype-specific size functions:

  sizeT (Leaf _) = 1
  sizeT (Node _ lt rt) 
    = 1 + (sizeT lt) + (sizeT rt)

  sizeL Nil' = 0
  sizeL (Cons' _ xs)
    = 1 + (sizeL xs)

Instead of these ad hoc polymorphic functions, let's write them in a datatype-generic way. First, we define a type representation. In this section, we follow the generic programming style of Lightweight Implementation of Generics and Dynamics (LIGD) by Cheney and Hinze, 2002, as revised in Libraries for Generic Programming in Haskell by Jeuring et al., 2009...