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

Summary

In this chapter, we studied DSLs embedded as libraries in Haskell. We saw two examples of such embedded DSLs – one for pretty-printing source code and one for financial contracts. Both revolve around an abstract data type, several combinators to construct values of that abstract data type, and one or more interpretation functions. We also studied two implementation techniques, deep and shallow embedding, as well as a refinement of the latter (“finally tagless”) for additional flexibility.

Chapter 14, Parser Combinators, complements this chapter. It introduces another example of a DSL for parsing that has been copied from Haskell to other programming languages. Moreover, this DSL is quite useful for processing standalone DSLs with a custom syntax.