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

Lists

As a first example of recursion, we will study Haskell’s built-in datatype for lists.

List syntax

A list is a sequence of an arbitrary number of elements of some type. For instance, seasons is a list of strings:

seasons :: [String]
seasons = ["spring","summer","fall","winter"]

The signature shows that the list type is written as two square brackets, [ and ], with the type of elements between them. In the case of seasons, the element type is String. The equation of seasons shows that a list value is written as a comma-separated list of elements between square brackets.

As the notation suggests, the list type is parametric in its element type. For example, redSuits is a list of Suits:

redSuits :: [Suit]
redSuits = [Hearts,Diamonds]

This uses the Suit datatype from the previous chapter.

A special case of a list is an empty list – for example, of Bool elements:

noBools :: [Bool]
noBools = []

Another...