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

Standard libraries

From this chapter onward, we will more actively see and use code from the Haskell standard libraries. This serves two purposes. Firstly, functions in the standard libraries often serve as good examples of particular programming patterns. Secondly, knowing these library functions (alongside the language features and programming patterns) makes us more fluent programmers.

Haskell comes with a rich set of standard libraries. The most prominent library is called the Prelude. It comes with some of the most heavily used functionality and does not need to be explicitly imported; it is imported by default. Another library that we will use frequently is Data.List, which contains functions related to lists. This library has to be imported explicitly by putting the following declaration at the top of the source file:

import Data.List

This imports all the functionality provided by the library. If only a small subset of that functionality should be imported, it can be...