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

A DSL for financial contracts

The domain-specific nature of the language means that programs can be more easily understood, and often also written or modified, by domain experts who do not have a background in programming. In this section, we’ll discuss such a DSL – one for financial contracts.

The idea for this DSL was first presented in 2000 in the paper Composing Contracts and has since been highly influential. Many (investment) banks have adopted this approach and set up in-house variants of the DSL (in a much more sophisticated form than what we’ll see here). It has carved out an important job market for functional programmers in the financial sector.

Compositional contracts

A contract is an agreement between two parties: the holder and the other party. (It can be generalized to more than two parties, but we won’t go that far in this book.) A contract is always formulated from the point of view of the holder. Here is an example contract that...