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

Writing compact code with HOF

Thanks to their function parameters, the behavior of HOF can be customized more extensively than that of similar first-order functions. This means they can be used in more circumstances. That is particularly true for the HOF of the previous sections because they cover highly general code patterns. In this section, we will show how some problems can be quickly and compactly solved by combining a number of HOF.

Standard deviation

The standard deviation of a list of numbers is a well-known statistical value that characterizes the amount of variation among those numbers. It is defined in terms of the average of those numbers. Let us first work out how to implement this average and then move on to the actual standard deviation.

Average

This average can easily be computed using predefined first-order functions:

average :: [Float] -> Float
average l = sum l / fromIntegral (length l)

Both sum and length are predefined functions that are themselves...