While it may not be advanced or mathematical enough for your needs, you may wish to read _The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia,_ by Paul Hudak. This is also an introductory book on functional programming, with a special focus on Haskell, although the examples used are mainly from multimedia. I compared the first few chapters of both _The Craft of Functional Programming_ and _The Haskell School of Expression,_ and personally found Hudak's book (the latter) much more interesting. The exercises are designed to teach the reader to think in terms of functional, as opposed to imperative or object-oriented, programming--hence the phrase in the title "School of Expression." --Ben -- Benjamin L. Russell russell@brainlink.com benjamin.russell.es.94@aya.yale.edu "Furuike ya! Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." --Matsuo Basho On Wed, 27 Dec 2000 17:30:19 -0800 Doug Ransom <Doug_Ransom@pml.com> wrote:
I have read "The Craft of Functional Programming" by Simon Thompson and a few paper on the web. "The Craft" is a good book, but it is an introduction to FP.
It seems to me it there are a lot of books on OO design I can pick up at the bookstore, but in the FP world, one must worm their way through all sorts of papers. I have seen papers on Catamorphisms, Monads, Programming with Barbed Wire, folds, etc. I think these papers are hard to understand if you don't have the acadademic/mathematical background -- being papers and not textbooks these papers assume a fair bit of base knowledge. I know I can design a fold function to use in place of primitive recursion for most data structures -- I just don't know if I should. It is pretty easy to get through "The Craft of Functional Programming" without understanding what Category Theory , a Catamorphism , or a Kleisli Composition is. I can see lots of real Software Engineering oppurtunities for these various techniques if I could just put them together.
Is there a good textbook on Functional Programming which starts from a base point similar to "The craft of Functional Programming" but more advanced in terms of introducing necessary topics like Category theory, catamorphisms, monads, etc? I would find such a book very useful, especially if it concentrated on lazy functional programming.
Doug Ransom Systems Engineer Power Measurement Ltd. http://www.pml.com 250-652-7100 office 250-652-0411 fax mailto:doug_ransom@pml.com
_______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell