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

Here are the answers to this chapter’s questions:

  1. As opposed to a GPL, a DSL is a language tailored toward a particular problem domain. It features concepts of that problem domain as primitives and aims to be more effective than a GPL for problem-solving within that domain.
  2. Embedding is a lightweight implementation technique for DSLs that makes use of the facilities of a general-purpose programming language, called the host language.

    Typically, an embedded DSL is set up as a library of the host language. This way, it has to abide by the syntax, type system, and abstraction mechanisms of the host language. In exchange, the development effort is very low as no custom facilities for parsing syntax, type-checking programs, and low-level code generation have to be created; the host language takes care of this.

    Typically, an embedded DSL revolves around one or more abstract data types. It provides a range of combinators for creating values of this abstract data type...