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

Monad subclasses

The six monad transformers, together with an appropriate base monad such as Identity or IO, allow us to put together a large number of different monads. Given the many choices for the monad that’s used by an application, we often do not want to fix the monad up front:

  • We may not have a full overview of the effects that are required by the application before we start writing parts of it
  • We may want to reuse different programs or parts of programs with different monads
  • We may want to quickly adapt an existing program to additional requirements, which may entail incorporating additional effects

To support these and similar scenarios, Haskell programmers can make use of type classes to abstract over the particular monad being used while still imposing requirements on it. These type classes are known as Monad subclasses, and there is one for each effect.

The MonadReader type class

Our first Monad subclass is for the reader effect:

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