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

Lazy lists


So far, we have implemented a linked list and a stack as a list. One of the key concepts in FP is the concept of lazy evaluation. We can make our list lazy so that the elements will be evaluated once we access them. We need to change node in such a way that it will return a function containing list as next, instead of the list itself. The function will be evaluated when it is called; therefore, our list will be lazy.

We start with modifying our node case. In our LinkedList example, next was of the LinkedList<Element> type. To make our list lazy, we will modify next to be a function that returns our list:

enum LazyList<Element: Equatable> { 
    case end 
    case node(data: Element, next: () -> LazyList<Element>) 
} 

As we can see in the preceding code, our node case is not defined as indirect because next is not of the LazyList type and is a reference to a function that returns LazyList.

We need to accommodate this change into our properties and methods. It is...