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

Higher-Order Functions

One of the most important concepts in programming is the notion of abstraction. Abstraction is the ability to reuse a common code pattern without having to repeat its details and by referring to it by name. Functions themselves are a fundamental form of abstraction. For instance, in the expressions 1+2 and 1+40, the common part is (1+). We can abstract over this common pattern by defining a function:

inc :: Integer -> Integer
inc n = 1 + n

In this chapter, we go one step further by abstracting over these abstractions. Indeed, we allow functions to have other functions as parameters. Such functions are called HOF (HOFs). A HOF represents a whole family of different functions that have the same overall structure but differ in some of the details. Arguably, support for HOFs is one of the defining features of the functional programming paradigm. The typical concise nature of functional programs is often due to the judicious composition of HOFs, and a programmer...