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

Higher-order functions


As we have seen in the Defining and using function parameters and Function types sections of this chapter, functions can accept functions as parameters in Swift. Functions that can accept other functions as parameters are called higher-order functions. This concept, along with first-class functions, empowers FP and function decomposition.

As this topic is essential in FP, we will go through another simple example.

Suppose that we need to develop two functions that add and subtract two Int values as follows:

func subtractTwoValues(a: Int, b: Int) -> Int { 
    return a - b 
} 

func addTwoValues(a: Int, b: Int) -> Int { 
    return a + b 
} 

Also, we need to develop functions to calculate the square and triple of two Int values as follows:

func square(a: Int) -> Int { 
    return a * a 
} 

func triple(a: Int) -> Int { 
    return a * a * a // or return square(a) * a 
} 

Suppose we need another function that subtracts the two squared values:

func subtractTwoSquaredValues...