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

Kinds of types


You may have heard that Functional Programming (FP) uses concepts of the category theory and type theory. This link is the reason why some people find FP closer to mathematics. Theoretically, category refers to a collection that contains the following:

  • A collection of objects (types in Swift)
  • A collection of morphisms, each of which ties two objects together (functions in Swift)
  • A notion of composition of the morphisms (function composition in Swift)

We have already discussed functions and function composition and now we are going to explore types.

It is possible to categorize types in four different ways:

  • Named versus compound types
  • Sum versus product types
  • Abstract versus concrete types
  • Value versus reference types

Any type that we can give a name to while we define it, is a named type. For instance, if we create a class named OurClass, any instance of OurClass will be of the OurClass type.

Function types and tuple types are compound types. A compound type may contain named types and...