As a typical C# developer, occasionally it’s good to take a step out of the Microsoft box, and see what other fascinating things exist. Let’s take a look at a programming language named Haskell.
Haskell is a functional programming language. It’s designed to be use pure functions, meaning it’s functions don’t have side-effects. No objects are modified, no global state changed. Whenever the same input goes into a function, the same result will come out every time.
add x y = x + yTake the add function for example. Whenever you give it 2 and 3 as arguments,
it will always return 5.
I know, what you’re thinking, “I can do that in language X already!” And you’re right, you can. However, this is just a simple example. Try this:
prepend x ys = x : ysThe prepend method will place an item x on the front of a list ys. So for
example if you called prepend 5 [3,2,1] then [5,3,2,1] would be returned.
Different from many imperative languages, Haskell will not actually modify the
list ys, but rather create a new one with x at the head of it.
Haskell is lazy, in a good way. When performing list operations, it will wait until the moment it needs to evaluate something before actually doing it. Say for example you wanted to calculate the first 5 odd numbers:
odds = [1,3..]
take 5 odds
--OUTPUT: [1,3,5,7,9]The expression [1,3..] is a list starting at 1, incrementing by 2, that
continues on to infinity (assuming no memory/time/processor restrictions). take
5 will return the first 5 values off of a list. If you wanted to get the first
10, 100, or 1000, just replace the 5 in take 5.
For a slightly more complex example, consider getting the first 10 odd numbers that are not a multiple of 5.
oddsNotDivisibleBy5 = [x | x <- [1,3..], x `mod` 5 /= 0]
take 10 oddsNotDivisibleBy5
--OUTPUT: [1,3,7,9,11,13,17,19,21,23]oddsNotDivisibleBy5 is a list comprehension. It basically says, “give me x
where x is each odd number from 1 onward and meets the criteria of having a
non-zero modulus 5.” oddsNotDivisibleBy5 will continue indefinitely. However,
the calculation of its values will be done when each is requested.
Haskell can be quite a different world to plunge into. While there is no Hitchhikers Guide, there are good resources available to get you on your way.
17 Jun 2010