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

Answers

  1. Lists can be created with the syntax [e1,...,en] where e1,...,en is a comma-separated list of elements. The empty list is just written []. More primitive notation for constructing a composite list is (e:es), where e is the first element of the new list and es is an existing list that becomes the tail (or remainder) of the new list.

    Lists can be processed with a range of predefined list functions, with list comprehensions and with custom functions (see the next question).

  2. Functions over lists can be defined by pattern matching, just like for other ADTs. The typical form distinguishes two cases, that of the empty list [] and of the non-empty list (x:xs).
  3. ADT definitions are recursive when we mention the type we are defining in one or more of its constructors field types. They are processed, like ordinary ADTs, with pattern matching on the constructors. Usually the functions are recursive and make use of structural recursion (see the next question).
  4. In structural...