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

Immutable variables


In the imperative programming style, values held in application variables whose contents never change are known as constants to differentiate them from variables that could be altered during execution. Examples might include a view's height and width or the value of Π to several decimal places.

Unlike programming languages such as Objective-C in which some types are mutable and some are not, Swift provides a way to create an immutable or mutable version of the same type. In Swift, we use the let and var keywords to create and store values:

  • The var keyword is used to create a variable that can be altered later, in other words, to create mutable variables
  • The let keyword is used to create a constant that cannot be altered later, in other words, immutable variables or constants

Therefore, in Swift, we do not need to have types such as NSMutableArray as opposed to NSArraym, or NSMutableDictionary as opposed to NSDictionary to differentiate between mutability and immutability...