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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored testing in Haskell. In particular, we contrasted unit testing with property-based testing in QuickCheck. The latter allows more thorough testing with less effort, but writing test properties requires a bit more abstraction. We have seen that, to support properties of user-defined types, we should instantiate the Arbitrary type class to supply a generator for test inputs. Ideally, we also supply a shrinking strategy, which QuickCheck uses to derive smaller, more manageable counterexamples.

Although still relatively little known outside of the Haskell community, there are clones of the QuickCheck library available for many other programming languages. Also, for Haskell, several variants exist, such as SmallCheck, which replaces random generation with systematic enumeration of small values. Moreover, modern testing frameworks such as hspec combine property-based and unit testing under the same roof.