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

Writing basic functions

In this section, we write our first Haskell functions to get acquainted with Haskell’s syntax and basic elements.

Our first function

Let us start with a simple function for incrementing an integer:

increment :: Int -> Int
increment x = x + 1

This function definition consists of two lines. The first line is the type signature and the second line defines the behavior of the function. The type signature states that the function has the name increment and, given a value of the Int type as input, produces a result of the Int type. Here, Int is of course the type of integers such as -1, 0, and 42.

The second line is an equation that says that increment x (where x is any possible input) is equal to x + 1. We can read such an equation also operationally: given any x input, the increment function returns the result x + 1. Here, x is called a variable; it acts as a placeholder for an actual input to the function. The result x + 1 is called the...