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

First-class functions


In the Function types section of this chapter, we saw that we can define function types and store and pass functions around. In practice, this means that Swift treats functions as values. To explain this, we will need to examine a couple of examples:

let name: String = "Grace" 

In this code example, we create a constant of the String type name and store a value ("Grace") into it.

When we define a function, we need to specify the type of parameter, as follows:

func sayHello(name: String) { 
    print("Hello, \(name)") 
} 

In this example, our name parameter is of the String type. This parameter could be any other value type or reference type. Simply, it could be Int, Double, Dictionary, Array, Set, or it could be an object type such as an instance of class, struct, or enum.

Now, let's call this function:

sayHello(name: "Your name") // or 
sayHello(name: name) 

Here, we pass a value for this parameter. In other words, we pass one of the previously mentioned types with their respective...