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 introduced the concept of recursive definitions for both functions and datatypes. We saw how recursive datatypes allow us to express values of an arbitrarily large size, with Haskell’s built-in list type as a notable example. Functions that process such recursive datatypes are themselves naturally recursive. More specifically, when the recursive structure of a function aligns with that of the datatype it processes, we speak of structural recursion. We saw several common variations in structural recursion as well as a few examples of non-structural recursion.

In Chapter 4, Higher-Order Functions, we will see how repeated patterns in function definitions, such as the structural recursion scheme we used here, can themselves be captured as reusable code. The key mechanism that enables this is the ability to pass functions as parameters to other functions. Such functions with function parameters are called higher-order functions.