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

This chapter has explained to us how to define and use algebraic datatypes, with pattern matching as a notable concept for taking values apart. First, we have seen the restricted forms of enumeration types and record types. Next, we have seen how these can be in their more general form by combining features of the two. We have also introduced parametric polymorphism, a powerful mechanism for abstracting over types, that can be used in function signatures and in the definition of algebraic datatypes.

In Chapter 3, Recursion, we will learn about recursive definitions, which can be used for both functions and datatypes. Recursive function definitions are the counterpart of imperative loops and enable (both bounded and unbounded) repetition of computation. Recursive datatype definitions enable data structures of arbitrary size and are typically processed by recursive functions.