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

Closures


Closures are great tools for FP as they are functions without the func keyword and name. Like functions, closures are self-contained blocks of code that provide a specific functionality and can be stored, passed around, and used in the code. Closures capture the constants and variables of the context in which they are defined. Although closures are the equivalent of blocks in Objective-C, they have a simpler syntax in Swift compared to the C and Objective-C block syntax. Nested functions, which we have covered in a previous section, are special cases of closures. Closures are reference types that can be stored as variables, constants, and type aliases. They can be passed to and returned from functions.

Closure syntax

A general closure syntax is as follows:

 { (parameters) -> ReturnType in // body of closure }

A closure definition starts with {, then we define the closure type, and finally we use the in keyword to separate the closure definition from its implementation.

After the in...