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

Functions

While FP has been around for many decades, its following has only been growing rapidly in recent years. More programmers are picking up functional programming languages or are programming in a functional style in non-functional languages than ever before. At the same time, existing non-functional programming languages are adopting a growing number of FP features and libraries.

In these ongoing developments, Haskell stands out as a reference for all. As a purely FP language, it embodies the ideal of FP. As a trailblazer for new (functional) programming language developments, it sets the bar for other languages to follow in its tracks.

Before diving into practical FP, this chapter gives a brief overview of what FP is and how Haskell fits in. Then, we start with our first Haskell functions. We learn how to define and call functions. This includes an explanation of all the syntactic elements (types, type signature, function body, and so on) and their role. Along the way...