Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By : Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva
Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By: Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva

Overview of this book

Type-driven development is an approach that uses a static type system to achieve results including safety and efficiency. Types are used to express relationships and other assumptions directly in the code, and these assumptions are enforced by the compiler before the code is run. Learn Type-Driven Development covers how to use these type systems to check the logical consistency of your code. This book begins with the basic idea behind type-driven development. You’ll learn about values (or terms) and how they contrast with types. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover how to combine types and values inside modules and build structured types out of simpler ones. You’ll then understand how to express choices or alternatives directly in the type system using variants, polymorphic variants, and generalized algebraic data types. You’ll also get to grips with sum types, build sophisticated data types from generics, and explore functions that express change in the types of values. In the concluding chapters, you’ll cover advanced techniques for code reuse, such as parametric polymorphism and subtyping. By end of this book, you will have learned how to iterate through a type-driven process of solving coding problems using static types, together with dynamic behavior, to obtain more safety and speed.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

We have seen that ReasonML supports parametric polymorphism using type variables, one of the language features. When using type variable as the type of a function's parameter, values of any type are accepted for that parameter. This technique allows writing what we call generic functions and plays an important part in code reusability in ReasonML.

In contrast, ad hoc polymorphism, the other kind of polymorphism that is supported in popular programming languages, does not yet exist in ReasonML. But work is in progress to correct that lack in a future version.

Modules also play an important role in code reuse. But, that's not all. In addition to what they allow by themselves, ReasonML has a powerful feature that augments what we can do with them: functors. They are like special functions that take one or several modules as input and return a module. That opens...