Book Image

Mastering F#

By : Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad
Book Image

Mastering F#

By: Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad

Overview of this book

F# is a multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and is supported both by industry-leading companies who provide professional tools and by an active open community, F# is rapidly gaining popularity as it emerges in digital music advertising, creating music-focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web. This book will guide you through the basics and will then help you master F#. The book starts by explaining how to use F# with Visual Studio, file ordering, and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage. It moves on to explain the functional core of F# such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, and lazy evaluation. Next, the book takes you through imperative and asynchronous programming, F# type providers, applications, and testing in F#. Finally, we look into using F# with distributed programming and using F# as a suitable language for data science. In short, this book will help you learn F# for real-world applications and increase your productivity with functional programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Generics


F# functions, discriminated unions, records, and object-oriented style expressions can be generic. Generics are a very intrinsic part of F#. Making your code generic can be simple in F# because your code is often implicitly inferred to be generic by the compiler's type inference and automatic generalization mechanisms.

For an explicit generic function or type, we will need to declare the generic type as <'T> using angle brackets, just like in C#.

    type Calculator<'T> 
    or 
    member this.Add<'T>('T x, 'T y) 

Note

An important difference with C# is that, in F#, we will need to prefix the name of the compiler arguments with an apostrophe.

Implicit declarations, as said, are inferred automatically by the F# compiler. So basically, we can define the function or the type, and that's it:

    let add x y = x + y 
    or 
    member this.Add(x, y) = x + y 

There are some limitations with automatic generalizations; for example, if the F# compiler may not be able to generalize...