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

Lazy Evaluation

So far, we have not paid much attention to how Haskell programs are evaluated. Perhaps you have not seen anything out of the ordinary, but then we have really only scratched the surface. When we dig a little deeper, it turns out that Haskell’s evaluation strategy is quite different from that of other languages.

While other languages eagerly evaluate the program, Haskell has a much lazier attitude. Why should it do any work when it’s not clear that work is actually necessary? That’s why Haskell puts off evaluating any part of the program until it becomes clear that no result can be produced without doing that work.

This chapter gives a good idea of how evaluation works and why there is room for different strategies. It briefly covers the most popular evaluation strategy among programming languages, Call by Value, and its opposite, Call by Name. We will learn that neither is ideal and that Haskell’s lazy evaluation strategy combines the...