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

Haskell versus I/O – a thought experiment

Most programming languages provide a similar approach to deal with I/O-related tasks. They provide functions, procedures, or methods that are essentially indistinguishable from other functions, procedures, or methods in the language. Not so in Haskell, where both lazy evaluation and Haskell’s principled approach toward functions mean that I/O should not be treated in the same way.

Before diving into Haskell’s approach toward I/O, this section explains why the conventional approach does not work. As a thought experiment, we will use two minimal I/O functions – getChar, which reads a single character from the standard input, and putChar, which writes a single character to the standard output. Following other languages, the types of these functions could be getChar :: () -> Char and putChar :: Char -> ().

Let us proceed with a hypothetical world where Haskell has the aforementioned two functions with those...