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

Non-structural recursion

You can write recursive functions that do not follow the structure of a datatype. Some of them are problematic and to be avoided, while others are legitimate. We will review several patterns here.

Non-termination

Non-terminating functions are an important class of recursive functions that are non-structural. Here is a first, small example:

loop :: Integer -> Integer
loop x = loop x

Here is an example derivation:

  loop 5
= loop 5
= loop 5
= …

Clearly, this derivation never terminates; it just repeats itself endlessly. If you have inadvertently invoked such a non-terminating function call in GHCi, you can abort it with the Ctrl + C key combination.

While the loop function is blatantly non-terminating, the source of non-termination may often not be so apparent when it dresses up in a lot more code (such as mutually recursive functions).

A slightly different pattern of non-termination is the following:

diverge :: [Integer...