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

Higher-order functions


I've mentioned on many occasions that functions are first-class entities in F# because they can be used as arguments for other functions or can be returned from other functions as results. This is exactly the indication of higher-order functions. A higher-order function may have another function as a parameter, it may return another function as a result, or it may perform both these things.

All functions are considered function values in F#; this treatment allows you to not make any distinction between functions and other kinds of values in any context where values are used. I will cover some such contexts here, namely an argument to another function, a value returned from a function, and a part of a data structure.

Anonymous functions

In some situations, it makes sense to have the ability of defining a function that does not carry the explicit name. Typically, such an ability is nice to have for functions that are the subject of manipulation by higher-order functions...