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

Functions as data structures

In this last section, we will aim to further shift our perspective away from functions as a mechanism to perform computations on functions as data, or, more specifically, on functions as data structures.

Evaluation with many variables

In Chapter 3, Recursion, we looked at an interpreter for a small expression language that features one variable. Let us generalize this now to expressions that can contain many different variables:

data Expr = Var String | Lit Int | Add Expr Expr

This data type has a constructor, Var, to denote a variable expression. The constructor’s String field identifies which of the possibly many variables is referenced. For example, the expression x + (y + 3) would be written as follows:

expr :: Expr
expr = Add (Var "x") (Add (Var "y") (Lit 3))

When evaluating an expression like this, we need to know what values the "x" and "y" variables take. This was easy in Chapter 3,...