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

Algebraic Datatypes

While functions are, of course, central in functional programming, they have to have values to process. Haskell classifies values by means of types and provides a number of built-in types such as Integer and Bool. Yet, these integer types are rather limited and rather generic. For this reason, Haskell provides a facility for defining user-defined datatypes, called algebraic datatypes.

This chapter explains how algebraic datatypes work. We first study two simple forms of algebraic datatypes (enumerations and records) that have well-known counterparts in other programming languages. Then, we merge the two features into the full-blown form of algebraic datatypes. We learn about the different elements of an algebraic datatype definition: the type name, the data constructors, and their fields. We see how algebraic datatype values are created and how they are taken apart by pattern matching. Finally, we see how both functions and algebraic datatypes can be parameterized...