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

Parser combinators

Parser combinators are a compositional approach for defining parsers in the style of the embedded DSLs, which we covered in the previous chapter. In this section, we will cover basic combinators and the essence of their implementation.

A parser for sums

A parser is a kind of data structure that is assembled from combinators. The (abstract) type of the parser is Parser a; this type denotes a parser that processes a string and produces a result of the a type. For example, to parse sum expressions, we want a parser, exprP, of the Parser Expr type.

Once we have a parser, we can apply it to an input string using the following interpretation function:

parse :: Parser a -> String -> Maybe a

Because the input string may not be in the expected format, the parser can fail; this is modeled with the Maybe a result type.

We expect the following behavior:

*Main> parse exprP "1+2"
Just (Plus (Lit 1) (Lit 2))
*Main> parse exprP "1+...