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

Kinds and type constructors

We have already studied and used types extensively. They allow us to distinguish between different forms of values in a way that can be used to document and automatically check our code. Kinds do the same thing one level up: they are a way of distinguishing different forms of types.

Proper types

The simplest and most ubiquitous group of types are so-called proper types. These are what we meant when we used the word type earlier in this book. Probably all the types that come to your mind are proper types: Int, Bool, [Char], Float -> String, and so on.

The kind associated with proper types is written *. This kind is often pronounced type, and in recent years, GHC has provided Type as a synonym for * in the Data.Kind module.

We can check the kind of a type in GHCi with the :kind command (or :k for short):

*Main> :kind Int
Int :: *
*Main> :kind Bool -> (Char, Float)
Bool -> (Char, Float) :: *

Another term for proper types is...