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

Summary

In this chapter, we explained why Haskell needs an unusual approach toward I/O – namely, to reconcile I/O with lazy evaluation and the mathematical notion of functions, Haskell separates the tasks of describing I/O and performing it. A Haskell program assembles an I/O description out of primitive functions and the bind operator, (>>=), which is then performed by the runtime system. Writing I/O programs is facilitated by the imperative-style do notation and the availability of a convenient range of primitive I/O functions in the standard library.

Now that we have concluded our overview of the key functional programming and Haskell-specific language features, we will shift our focus to the more advanced programming patterns that are captured as reusable abstractions in the Haskell libraries. Chapter 9, Monoids and Foldables, introduces us to the first two abstractions – a generalization of lists to other collections whose content can also be processed in...