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

Implementing DSLs

There are two main techniques for implementing an embedded DSL in Haskell: deep embedding and shallow embedding. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and we will study both.

Running example

To illustrate the deep embedding technique, and later the shallow embedding, we will use a small DSL for describing geometric regions. This DSL was originally developed for a prototype system in a US Navy study. The prototype had to keep track of where different entities (ships, planes, and so on) were concerning each other. Different regions (also called zones) have different significance: coming too close to friendly units is interpreted as hostile intent, certain corridors are reserved for airline routes, and so on.

The core abstract data type in this DSL is Region. There are several combinators for constructing such regions. For the sake of minimality, we’ll only consider three here:

  • A primitive region is a circular shape around the origin, with...