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. You can make a function more general by replacing one of the (other) functions it calls with a parameter. The type of this function parameter will be the same as the type of the function abstracted over. Further generality is often possible at this point by generalizing the types by means of parametric polymorphism.
  2. The foldr function captures the structural recursion scheme for lists:
    foldr :: (a -> b -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b
    foldr c n []     = n
    foldr c n (x:xs) = c x (foldr c n xs)

    The n parameter abstracts over the result for the base constructor, [], and the c function parameter for the recursive constructor, (:). Similar fold functions can be written for other algebraic datatypes.

  3. Notable predefined HOF are as follows:
    • map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
    • filter :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> [a]
    • any :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> Bool
    • all :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> Bool
    • takeWhile :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -...