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

Combining functions

You can write larger Haskell programs by composing simple functions into more complex ones.

Calling functions from within functions

Functions are composed simply by defining a more complex function in terms of simpler functions. This means that the definition of the complex function calls other functions.

For example, let us write a function to compute the price of a purchase given the price of the purchased item and the quantity at which it is purchased:

price :: Float -> Int -> Float
price ip qty = ip * fromIntegral qty

This is already an example of the principle that a more complex function, price, calls simpler functions. In this case, the simpler functions are two predefined functions: the (*) operator and the fromIntegral function. Recall that the fromIntegral conversion is needed to convert the Int quantity to a Float type before it can be multiplied by the item price.

When our business logic evolves, we can introduce a discounted price...