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

Parser Combinators

Parsing is the act of turning a usually human-readable structured text into a data structure that can be easily processed in software. The best-known application of parsers is on compilers. A compiler frontend takes the text written by programmers, the source code, and turns it into an abstract syntax tree, which is a more convenient data structure to work with in the next stages of the compiler. Besides parsing source code, many other structured text formats are parsed, such as JSON, YMAL, and XML, which are used for all kinds of data entry, data exchange, and configuration.

To make parsing possible, the text cannot take on an arbitrary form. It needs to be structured in a particular way, and follow certain rules. Formally, the expected text structure is sometimes codified in a grammar, which serves as a non-executable specification for the parser. This formal background, together with the development of many sophisticated and intricate parsing approaches for...