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

Unit testing versus property-based testing

In this section, we’ll review unit testing, probably the most common and well-known form of software testing, and identify several important shortcomings. Then, we’ll introduce property-based testing and explain how it improves upon those shortcomings.

Unit testing

Unit testing is perhaps the most familiar and most obvious way of testing code, especially in the setting of functional programming.

In Haskell, the smallest meaningful unit of code that can be tested is a function. The way to test a function is to supply it with an input and see whether it produces the corresponding expected output. If not, there is either something wrong with the function’s implementation or with our understanding of how it should behave. Either way, we have identified a problem that needs to be investigated further.

Manual testing

With the GHCi interactive shell, such unit testing often happens naturally. When we have written...