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. Parsing is the act of turning a, usually human-readable, structured text into a data structure that can be easily processed in software.
  2. Parser combinators are an embedded DSL for parsing. They define parsers in a compositional way, assembling primitive parsers into larger ones.
  3. Parser combinators have several advantages:
    • They are more convenient to write than hand-rolling your own parser
    • As an embedded DSL, they are easily integrated into a code base and do not hamper the development process
    • They do not require learning a new language and have a low threshold for entry
    • Monad parsers are very flexible and expressive; the parsing behavior can be determined dynamically
  4. Parser combinators also have several disadvantages compared to parser generators:
    • Their performance is usually not as good as that of parser generators and can be pathologically bad if we aren’t careful (for example, in the case of left...