Book Image

Haskell Cookbook

Book Image

Haskell Cookbook

Overview of this book

Haskell is a purely functional language that has the great ability to develop large and difficult, but easily maintainable software. Haskell Cookbook provides recipes that start by illustrating the principles of functional programming in Haskell, and then gradually build up your expertise in creating industrial-strength programs to accomplish any goal. The book covers topics such as Functors, Applicatives, Monads, and Transformers. You will learn various ways to handle state in your application and explore advanced topics such as Generalized Algebraic Data Types, higher kind types, existential types, and type families. The book will discuss the association of lenses with type classes such as Functor, Foldable, and Traversable to help you manage deep data structures. With the help of the wide selection of examples in this book, you will be able to upgrade your Haskell programming skills and develop scalable software idiomatically.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Working with Applicatives

An Applicative is a type class that is somewhere between a Functor and a Monad. An Applicative takes a Functor one step further. A Functor talks about application of a function a -> b to a data type f a, whereas an Applicative talks about application of a data type of a function f (a -> b) to a data type f a.

In this recipe, we will work with Maybe and Either data types, and see how we can work with Applicative instances in the context of these data types.

How to do it...

  1. Create a new project working-with-applicative with the simple Stack template:
        stack new working-with-applicative simple
  1. Open src/Main.hs and add the following imports after the initial module definition. The Applicative...