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

Applicative functors

Just like the notion of Functor can be understood as a generalization of the map function for lists to other type constructors, the notion of Applicative functors is a generalization of the zip/zipWith functions for lists. However, for the sake of generality, it requires a variant of the zip and zipWith functions that we are already familiar with. Hence, we will explain that setup first before we dive into the general notion of Applicative functors.

A family of zip functions

The standard library provides several zip-like functions to merge lists. The basic one is defined as follows:

Prelude
zip :: [a] -> [b] -> [(a,b)]
zip []     ys     = []
zip xs     []     = []
zip (x:xs) (y:ys) = (x,y) : zip xs ys

This merges the two given lists into a new list by combining the elements at the corresponding positions into a tuple. The new list comes to an end...