Haskell!

Mon 13:00-13:50

Misc Materials

• Haskell April Fool's: Microsoft Buys Haskell. Not so funny anymore!
• Nice Pro-Haskell Blog Rant
• John Hughes's inspiring paper Why Functional Programming Matters.

  Less Misc Materials

  Slides for lecture 1 2 3 4 5 6

  Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

  Haskell cheatsheet

  Real World Haskell

  Try Haskell in your browser, with nice interactive basic tutorial.

  Assignments

  Please turn assignments in by mail to barak+cs430@cs.nuim.ie.

  Inline comments appreciated.

  Test cases, and maybe even a test jig of some sort, is a good habit, and in the case of Haskell programs a particularly good idea for your own sanity.

  For each assignment, please turn in whatever you have before the deadline; don't skip class to work on it! My teaching methodology for these is "keep working on it until it is actually done", like a project at work. This means if you or I find problems in your code, please work on it until they are ironed out and send me the updated version. I am happy to give feedback or assistance with intermediate (partly working) versions.

  1. Install GHC and play with it
  2. Write a program to justify (or "fill") a paragraph of text.

     -- Breaks string into lines, returning list of lines.  Squeezes out
     -- multiple spaces, and initial and final spaces.  Numeric argument
     -- is maximum line length.
     
     justifyPar :: Int -> String -> [String]
     
     -- Calling this
     
     justifyPar 72 "   stowaways carnival taxes radioactivity's   Micky tearjerker toughing gall questionnaire's sleepwalking Aldan's Salem's game announce hygrometer's scriptwriter meow saleswoman sanitarium's  gulf's somnolent kitten's lousiness's! ski zealous Diocletian's Fomalhaut's whacks wreaked brings craftiness temping dehumanization's   votary       childishness crevasse  opportunism snowshoeing gibbets antedating monarchies chemotherapy's, embankment exhaustion personalize portray swills cremation's jostles preshrunken titular preterit's silversmith's okras print equable lamely sox Anglophile's accumulating causeless acacia    cruciform fagged average's courthouse's shellfish's impulsiveness.     "
     
     -- yields this
     
     ["stowaways carnival taxes radioactivity's Micky tearjerker toughing",
     "gall questionnaire's sleepwalking Aldan's Salem's game announce",
     "hygrometer's scriptwriter meow saleswoman sanitarium's gulf's",
     "somnolent kitten's lousiness's! ski zealous Diocletian's Fomalhaut's",
     "whacks wreaked brings craftiness temping dehumanization's votary",
     "childishness crevasse opportunism snowshoeing gibbets antedating",
     "monarchies chemotherapy's, embankment exhaustion personalize portray",
     "swills cremation's jostles preshrunken titular preterit's",
     "silversmith's okras print equable lamely sox Anglophile's accumulating",
     "causeless acacia cruciform fagged average's courthouse's shellfish's",
     "impulsiveness."]
     

     Goal: done before class on Mon 3-Oct-2011.
  3. Write a useful program. Solve some problem you need to solve for some reason by writing a program in Haskell. You will be scored on (a) how interesting and useful the problem you found is, and (b) the code itself. (Example: I've been brushing up on my Haskell by writing the data generation and processing system for my CS401 class in Haskell. This involved doing I/O, learning some random number generation libraries, and repeated re-factoring as new tasks were added.)

     Goal: due one week before the exam.