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

Answers

Here are the answers to this chapter’s questions:

  1. A lens is a first-class data accessor. In its standard form, it focuses on a particular field in a data structure and allows you to both retrieve and modify the value of that field.

    Packages such as lens and microlens use the following function-based representation for (monomorphic) lenses:

    type Lens' s v =
      forall f. Functor f => (v -> f v) -> (s -> f s)

    Here, the s type parameter denotes the source type (the data structure) and the v parameter denotes the view type (the field).

    A key property that makes working with lenses convenient is that they compose. The preceding function-based representation lens composition is simply function composition, (.).

  2. A polymorphic lens is a lens that allows you to modify the value of a view in a way that changes its type, from v to w. As a consequence, the type of the source changes as well, from s to t.

    Packages such as lens and microlens use the...