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

Algebraic data types


Enumerations in Swift are actually algebraic data types that are types created by combining other types. Algebraic data types are essential to many functional programming languages, such as Haskell.

An algebraic data type is based on the idea of algebraic structures, which are a set of possible values and one or more operators to combine a finite number of these values into a single one. An example structure is (Z, +, -), a set of all integers (in math, Z refers to set of all positive and negative integer numbers) with the plus and minus operations on them.

So an algebraic data type is a data type that is created by algebraic operations, specifically, with sum and product as our operations.

Additionally, algebraic data types are composite data types that may contain multiple values such as a data type with multiple fields, or they may consist of variants or multiple finite different values.

Simple types

The Boolean type is a simple algebraic data type as it may take one of...