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 do notation

The so-called do notation is syntactic sugar that unclutters the use of I/O and makes Haskell code somewhat resemble that of imperative languages.

Imperative Style

The do notation mimics the typical imperative programming style of writing sequential statements on consecutive lines. For example, here is the earlier greeting example, now with the do notation:

main :: IO ()
main = do putStrLn "What is your name?"
          name <- getLine
          putStrLn ("Hello, " ++ name ++ "!")

This program contains one do block. The block is started by the do keyword and features one I/O action per line. The result of the do block is the result of the last I/O action.

A do block can be systematically desugared as follows:

  • When the block consists of multiple lines, we can extract the first line and recursively desugar the remaining...