I’m learning functional programming and writing things down as I go. Some of my understanding may be incomplete or wrong, and I expect to refine it in the fullness of time.

Today I was working on CIS194 Homework 1.

I learned how to provide a modicum of interactivity - the following code reads lines in from the keyboard and then outputs text based on the input:

-- Validate the given string 
validate :: String -> String
validate str = if isValid str then "Valid" else "Not valid" 

-- Use lines to break up input on \n
-- Use unlines to join multiple lines of output (and separate them by \n)
validateInput :: String -> String
validateInput input = unlines (map validate (lines input))

main :: IO ()
main = do
    putStrLn "Hello!"

    -- interact takes a String -> String function and 
    -- provides an input/output loop based on it
    interact validateInput

I believe this relies on lazy evaluation to provide an interactive input/output loop (i.e. I can enter a line and immediately see the result, then enter another one etc.).

Partial application is useful for writing readable code:

double = map (\x -> 2 * x)

The double function doubles the elements of a list. Here, I’ve only passed the first argument to map so it’s partially applied, which makes double a function of one argument (a list).

I’ve also used a lambda as the argument to map.

As a concluding remark, writing stateless functions is still difficult for now.

That’s it for today!