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

Recursion

The functions and datatypes we have written so far are limited in power:

  • We lack a mechanism to repeat a number of computation steps. If we want some computation to be repeated five times, we explicitly have to write five function calls. If we want six instead, we have to modify the program and add a sixth call.
  • Similarly, we lack a mechanism to arbitrarily extend the size of a data structure. If we want a data structure that holds five values, we have to write an algebraic datatype (ADT) definition with a constructor that has five fields. If five is not enough, and we want six instead, we need to modify existing definitions.

These extensions of existing definitions quickly become unwieldy for larger sizes, and we cannot dynamically determine the number at runtime (at least not beyond the cases we have explicitly foreseen while writing the program).

Imperative programs solve this problem in two different ways for repeated computations and data structure...