Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By : Gene Belitski
Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By: Gene Belitski

Overview of this book

Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Predecessor inherited language features


F# inherits the core of the features associated with its functional-first nature from ML and OCaml. This means that its chief fashion of expressing computations is via the definition and application of functions.

F# functions are first-class entities

The ability to define and apply functions is a common feature of many programming languages. However, F# follows ML and other functional programming languages in treating functions similarly to, say, numeric values. The ways of treating functions in F# go well beyond the limits usually associated with stored-program computer concept:

  • Functions can be used as arguments to other functions; the latter are higher-order functions in this case

  • Functions can be returned from other functions

  • Functions can be computed from other functions, for example, with the help of function composition operators

  • Functions can be elements of structures usually associated with data

Functions are free of side effects

Computations with...