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

First-Class Functions

In the previous chapter, we studied higher-order functions (HOFs), one of the defining features of functional programming. This chapter explains how Haskell actively supports working with HOFs by providing a number of facilitating language features.

The ability of HOFs to abstract over functions means that they are more reusable than first-order functions. Indeed, often tasks can be concisely handled by assembling a number of predefined higher-order functions. Of course, HOFs are useless without the functions that we supply to them as parameters. Hence, part of the effectiveness of HOFs stems from being able to quickly and concisely supply the right function parameters to instantiate the HOFs.

In the previous chapter, we often did not have the right function at hand to supply as a parameter. Instead, we wrote a dedicated new function, often in the form of a local definition, to make up for this lack. Recall, for example, the isSpaceCharacter function that...