The Functional Approach to Programming

Advanced text on how to program in the functional way; has exercises, solutions and code.

Guy Cousineau (Author), Michel Mauny (Author), K. Callaway (Translated by)

9780521576819, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 October 1998

460 pages, 55 b/w illus.
24.6 x 18.9 x 2.4 cm, 0.82 kg

"...a valuable contribution to programming practice...Cousineau and Mauny convincingly demonstrate the elegance and conciseness of the functional approach." Computing Reviews

A programming course should concentrate as much as possible on a program's logical structure and design rather than simply show how to write code. The Functional Approach to Programming achieves this aim because logical concepts are evident and programs are transparent so can be written quickly and cleanly. In this book the authors emphasise the notions of function and function application which relate programming to familiar concepts from mathematics and logic. They introduce functional programming via examples but also explain what programs compute and how to reason about them. They show how the ideas can be implemented in the Caml language, a dialect of the ML family, and give examples of how complex programs from a variety of areas (such as arithmetic, tree algorithms, graph algorithms, text parsing and geometry) can be developed in close agreement with their specifications. Many exercises and examples are included throughout the book; solutions are also available.

Introduction
Part I. Basic Principles: 1. Expressions
2. Data structures
3. Semantics
4. Imperative aspects
Part II. Applications: 5. Exact arithmetic
6. Formal terms, filtering, and unification
7. Balanced trees
8. Graphs and problem resolution
9. Syntactic analysis
10. Geometry and designs
Part III. Implementation: 11. Evaluation
12. Compilation
13. Types and typing
Appendix 1. Help for Caml Light 0.6
Appendix 2. How to Get Caml, MLgraph, and the examples
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Computer programming / software development [UM]