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

Generators

In this section, we’ll teach QuickCheck to generate test inputs for new data types.

Arbitrary

Out of the box, QuickCheck does not support properties of all types. It only supports the common data types in the standard library. Suppose we define a custom data type, say for the two states of a button:

data Button = On | Off deriving (Eq, Show)

We have written a simple function to toggle a button:

toggle :: Button -> Button
toggle On  = Off
toggle Off = On

We want to test this function using the following property:

prop_toggle b = toggle (toggle b) == b

This expresses that toggling the button twice brings it back to its original state. Unfortunately, QuickCheck cannot work with this property:

*Main> quickCheck prop_toggle
<interactive>:3:1: error:
    • No instance for (Arbitrary Button)
        arising from a use of ‘quickCheck’
    • In the expression: quickCheck prop_toggle
      In an equation...