Book Image

Soar with Haskell

By : Tom Schrijvers
Book Image

Soar with Haskell

By: Tom Schrijvers

Overview of this book

With software systems reaching new levels of complexity and programmers aiming for the highest productivity levels, software developers and language designers are turning toward functional programming because of its powerful and mature abstraction mechanisms. This book will help you tap into this approach with Haskell, the programming language that has been leading the way in pure functional programming for over three decades. The book begins by helping you get to grips with basic functions and algebraic datatypes, and gradually adds abstraction mechanisms and other powerful language features. Next, you’ll explore recursion, formulate higher-order functions as reusable templates, and get the job done with laziness. As you advance, you’ll learn how Haskell reconciliates its purity with the practical need for side effects and comes out stronger with a rich hierarchy of abstractions, such as functors, applicative functors, and monads. Finally, you’ll understand how all these elements are combined in the design and implementation of custom domain-specific languages for tackling practical problems such as parsing, as well as the revolutionary functional technique of property-based testing. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the key concepts of functional programming and be able to develop idiomatic Haskell solutions.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Basic Functional Programming
6
Part 2: Haskell-Specific Features
11
Part 3: Functional Design Patterns
16
Part 4: Practical Programming

The IO approach

In this section, we will see how Haskell overcomes the challenges of performing I/O, by means of an approach based on a special type called IO. The solution to the I/O problem in Haskell is a conceptual one. We split I/O into two parts. First, we make a description of what I/O actions should be performed, and in what order. This is akin to, for example, writing a recipe for chocolate mousse. The second part is to perform the actions described. This corresponds to making chocolate mousse by following the recipe.

Describing I/O

A description can be thought of as inert data; it just is and does not do anything itself. For example, a recipe is usually just text in a cookbook. We have seen an example of this already in the Expr datatype to describe arithmetic expressions:

data Expr = Lit Int | Add Expr Expr

When we write Add (Lit 5) (Lit 3), we just construct a data structure. No computation happens, and we do not get the value 8.

We have already constructed...