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. An ad hoc overloaded function (or operator) is similar to a polymorphic function in that it works for different types. Yet, it differs in two ways from a polymorphic function: 1) it does not work for all types, and 2) it has a different implementation per type. Haskell groups ad hoc overloaded functions into type classes, such as Eq with its (==) and (/=) methods. To indicate that a polymorphic function makes use of ad hoc overloaded operations, its type signature lists type class constraints on the type variables. For example, sort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] lists the Ord a constraint to indicate that it works for all element types that provide total ordering.
  2. You write a type class instance that provides implementations for the methods of the type class. Not all methods need to be implemented, only those that provide a minimal complete definition. For example, only (==) or (/=) needs to be implemented for Eq. An instance is expected to satisfy the laws of the type...