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

Input/Output

This chapter explains Haskell’s unique way of communicating with the outside world. The outside world is defined as any entities outside of the Haskell program, such as the user, the filesystem, the network, and the operating system. It’s used to display text to a user and get their input, read and write files, access and provide web services, get the current time and date, and so on.

The reason Haskell has a unique approach is twofold:

  • Firstly, lazy evaluation makes working with plain functions for communication purposes impossible from a practical point of view. The order of execution is too unpredictable to have a sensible interaction with a third party.
  • Secondly, a strong principle of the Haskell language is that its functions resemble as closely as possible the mathematical definition of what a function is. For one, this means that functions should be predictable in a very precise sense – for the same input, a function should always...