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

Combining data with algebraic data types


Usually a conventional programmer considers the matter of data composition through the prism of the object-oriented paradigm.

Everyone usually intuitively understands that primitive data types are basic, built-in types supported by a compiler or library: int64, string, bigint (although if viewed with a rigor, string may be considered as char array, and bigint as a record).

The next thing programmers learn is that instances of primitive types can be aggregated into collections such as arrays or lists. However, these collections are monomorphic. That is, the type of all collection members must be the same. Pretty limiting, huh?

The object-oriented paradigm extends primitive types with classes. The class just represents a custom type that hides the details of the data composition with the help of encapsulation and offers visibility to just the public properties. Typically, .NET libraries offer plenty of such composite types, for example, System.DateTime...