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

Ad hoc polymorphism

We will start this chapter by exploring the concept of ad hoc polymorphism. We will learn that Haskell uses type classes to declare which operators and functions are overloaded, and uses type class constraints in function signatures to limit how type variables can be instantiated.

What is ad hoc polymorphism?

Haskell provides several operators that work on values of multiple types, such as the equality test (==). We can, for instance, check whether two integer values are equal, two Boolean values, or two strings:

*Main> 1 == 2
False
*Main> True == True
True
*Main> "hello" == "world"
False

However, the operator does not work for all types. Notably, it does not work on functions. For example, we can’t compare the not :: Bool -> Bool function to itself:

*Main> not == not
<interactive>:2:1: error:
    • No instance for (Eq (Bool -> Bool)) arising from a use of '==&apos...