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

Shrinking

Once QuickCheck has found a counterexample, it’s the tester’s or programmer’s job to figure out why the test fails. The purpose of shrinking is to reduce the size of a counterexample as much as possible to make this more manageable.

Shrinking in action

To see what shrinking does, let’s return to the failing prop_at_zero property. We’ll contrast the same test run. When executed with quickCheck and with verboseCheck, the verbose version of quickCheck gives us a blow-by-blow account of the test run. The first gives a short report:

*Main> quickCheck prop_at_zero
*** Failed! Falsified (after 3 tests and 3 shrinks):
1
[0]

The second also shows the steps that precede the generation of that report:

*Main> verboseCheck prop_at_zero
Failed:
-2
[2,0]
Failed:
2
[2,0]
Passed:
0
[2,0]
Failed:
1
[2,0]
Passed:
0
[2,0]
Passed:
1
[]
Failed:
1
[0]
Passed:
0
[0]
Passed:
1
[]
*** Failed! Falsified (after 3 tests and 3 shrinks):
1
[0]
...