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. Beta reduction is the core mechanism of program evaluation in functional programs. It acts on a function application such as (\ x -> sin x) 1.0 and simplifies it to the body of that function sin x, in which it replaces the formal parameter x with the actual parameter 1.0.
  2. Call by Need is an evaluation strategy. An evaluation strategy decides which functional application to reduce in the current expression. Call by Need only reduces the top-level expression, provided it is a function application. Unlike the commonly used Call by Value strategy, this defers evaluating the function parameters and may eventually not evaluate them at all when this is not needed. At the same time, it employs a sharing mechanism known as thunks to avoid duplicating subexpressions and performing the same reduction repeatedly. In this sense, it is an improvement upon Call by Name.
  3. Streaming is an approach to data processing whereby a composite data structure (e.g., a list) is not first...