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

Anonymous functions

The first feature we will study to facilitate writing custom functions, usually as parameters for HOFs, are anonymous functions. These are also called lambda functions or lambda abstractions after their origin in the lambda calculus.

We will illustrate the concept of an anonymous function using the dropSpaces example from this chapter’s introduction. The local definition of its isSpaceCharacter function takes up two additional lines (or one if we omit the optional type signature). Moreover, it has to be given a name, which, while useful for documentation purposes, takes some effort. This effort has very little benefit, as the function is only called once, right where it is defined. Hence, the effort cannot be amortized over multiple call sites.

Anonymous function syntax

An anonymous function is a function that is not given a name. Hence, when referring to such a nameless function, we have to supply its definition instead. The nameless version of...