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

Records

A second use case of ADTs is often called record or struct types. The purpose of records is to group or structure several related pieces of data.

People

We create the Person ADT as a first simple example of a record datatype:

data Person = MkPerson String Int

Just like in the previous section, a new ADT is announced by the data keyword, followed by the name of the new type, which is Person in this case. Whereas the enumeration examples were defined in terms of a number of alternatives separated by | characters, a record type has only one alternative. This alternative is the MkPerson data constructor. What’s new is that this constructor takes two parameters, also called fields, of the String and Int types, respectively.

We create a new Person by calling the constructor on values of the appropriate type:

tom :: Person
tom = MkPerson "Tom" 45

In fact, the constructor behaves essentially like a function:

*Main> :t MkPerson
MkPerson :: String...