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

Full-blown algebraic datatypes

Full-blown algebraic datatypes combine the capabilities of both enumeration types and record types. Indeed, an ADT can have one or more data constructors, and each data constructor can have zero or more fields.

Shapes

The following Shape datatype features two constructors with a number of fields:

data Shape = Circle Double
           | Rectangle Double Double

A shape can be either a circle with a given radius or a rectangle with a given width and height. The next function computes the area of such a shape:

area :: Shape -> Double
area (Circle r)      = pi * r**2
area (Rectangle w h) = w * h

This function has two equations, one with a pattern for each of the two Shape constructors. This case analysis is a common template for writing functions over an ADT. The general shape of such a function for Shape is as follows:

f :: Shape -> …
f (Circle...