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

Currying and partial application

The second feature that aids in creating new functions as parameters to HOFs is currying. Currying is named after Haskell B. Curry, the logician after whom the Haskell language is named, even though Curry attributed the concept of currying to the logician Moses Schönfinkel; in fact, the first known application predates both and is credited to a third logician, Gottlob Frege. It is based on an idea that greatly simplifies the design and mechanics of a functional programming language, possibly requiring a revision of your current mental model of Haskell. The idea is that functions need not have more than one parameter. Whenever we want to write a multi-parameter function, we can simulate it instead by means of single-parameter functions. This idea features in the lambda calculus, as it serves its minimality objective. As we will now see, Haskell too has currying built in.

One parameter is enough

Let us revisit the very first two-parameter function...