Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology

Further Features

Understanding how a functional programmer thinks also means seeing how to build bigger pieces from smaller ones. Understanding Haskell means understanding its syntax. And sizing up functional and Haskell programming involves looking at performance. So we’ll touch on all three of these topics next, briefly.

Functional Glue

The other side of higher-order function use is how we use the building blocks to create larger blocks. Haskell is sometimes called an excellent “glue” language, because of the ease with which code units can be assembled. You’ve already seen pipelining—building large transformations from a sequence of smaller transformations, each contributing some piece towards the final result. Here’s a Haskell example, written ...