I've been trying to work out how to implement Church-encoded data types in Scala. It seems that it requires rank-n types since you would need a first-class const function of type forAll a. a -> (forAll b. b -> b). However, I was able to encode pairs thusly: import scalaz._ trait Compose[F[_],G[_]] { type Apply = F[G[A]] } trait Closu...
Hi, After being blown away by the greatness of irb and rails console, I am loving the dynamical parts of the language more and more. Now, I wonder if it would be possible for a Ruby application to update itself on-the-fly (if the write permission allows it). Can a Ruby application fetch an update and refresh itself? I have seen this fun...
Does "Value Restriction" practically mean that there is no higher order functional programming? I have a problem that each time I try to do a bit of HOP I get caught by a VR error. Example: let simple (s:string)= fun rq->1 let oops= simple "" type 'a SimpleType= F of (int ->'a-> 'a) let get a = F(fun req -> id) let oops2= get "" ...
A colleague once said that God is killing a kitten every time I write a for-loop. When asked how to avoid for-loops, his answer was to use a functional language. However, if you are stuck with a non-functional language, say C#, what techniques are there to avoid for-loops or to get rid of them by refactoring? With lambda expressions and...
I have a problem with writing a Cartesian power function. I found many examples about calculating Cartesian Product, but no one about Cartesian power. For example, [1;2] raised to power 3 = [ [1;1;1] ; [1;1;2] ; [1;2;1] ; [1;2;2] ; [2;1;1] ; [2;1;2] ; [2;2;1]; [2;2;2] ] I use following code to calculate Cartesian Product: let Cprod U ...
Mathematica has a built-in function ArgMax for functions over infinite domains, based on the standard mathematical definition. The analog for finite domains is a handy utility function. Given a function and a list (call it the domain of the function), return the element(s) of the list that maximize the function. Here's an example of fin...
Background I recently read that .NET 4's System.String class has a new overload of the Join method. This new overload takes a separator, and an IEnumerable<T> which allows arbitrary collections to be joined into a single string without the need to convert to an intermediate string array. Cool! That means I can now do this: var evenNum...
I've recently caught the FP bug (trying to learn Haskell), and I've been really impressed with what I've seen so far (first-class functions, lazy evaluation, and all the other goodies). I'm no expert yet, but I've already begun to find it easier to reason "functionally" than imperatively for basic algorithms (and I'm having trouble goin...
I've been working with node.js for awhile on a chat app (I know, very original, but I figured it'd be a good learning project). Underscore.js provides a lot of functional programming concepts which look interesting, so I'd like to understand how a functional program in javascript would be setup. From my understanding of functional pro...
How does ML perform the type inference in the following function definition: let add a b = a + b Is it like C++ templates where no type-checking is performed until the point of template instantiation after which if the type supports the necessary operations, the function works or else a compilation error is thrown ? i.e. for example,...
Hi, I am a C++ / Java programmer and the main paradigm I happen to use in everyday programming is OOP. In some thread I read a comment that Type classes are more intuitive in nature than OOP. Can someone explain the concept of type classes in simple words so that an OOP guy like me can understand it? ...
Consider a function f(x,y): f(x,0) = x*x; f(0,y) = y*(y + 1); f(x,y) = f(x,y-1) + f(x-1,y); If one tries to implement that recursively in some language like C++ he will encounter a problem. Suppose the function is first called with x = x0 and y = y0. Then for any pair (x,y) where 0 <= x < x0 and 0 <= y < y0 the intermediate values wi...
I'm new to funcctional programming and have some questions regarding coding style and debugging. I'm under the impression that one should avoid storing results from funcction calls in a temp variable and then return that variable e.g. let someFunc foo = let result = match foo with | x -> ... | y -...
And I mean that in the same sense that a C/Java for is just a funky syntax for a while loop. I still remember when first learning about the for loop in C, the mental effort that had to go into understanding the execution sequence of the three control expressions relative to the loop statement. Seems to me the same sort of effort has to ...
Hi, Knowing the argot of a field helps me a lot, especially since it allows me to converse intelligently with those who know a lot more than I, so I would like to find a good lexicon of Functional Programming terms. E.g., I repeatedly encounter these: Functor, Arrow, Category, Kleisli, Monad, Monoid, a veritable zoo of Morphisms, etc. ...
I have a function that looks as follows: let isInSet setElems normalize p = normalize p |> (Set.ofList setElems).Contains This function can be used to quickly check whether an element is semantically part of some set; for example, to check if a file path belongs to an html file: let getLowerExtension p = (Path.GetExtension p...
In terms that an OOP programmer would understand (without any functional programming background), what is a monad? What problem does it solve and what are the most common places it's used? EDIT: To clarify the kind of understanding I was looking for, let's say you were converting an FP application that had monads into an OOP applicati...
I'm trying to implement quicksort in a functional style using C# using linq, and this code randomly works/doesn't work, and I can't figure out why. Important to mention: When I call this on an array or list, it works fine. But on an unknown-what-it-really-is IEnumerable, it goes insane (loses values or crashes, usually. sometimes works.)...
In this PDF presentation on Haskell Type Classes, slide #54 has this question: Open Question: In a language with generics and constrained polymorphism, do you need subtyping too? My questions are: How do generics and constrained polymorphism make subtyping unnecessary? If generics and constrained polymorphism make subty...
How to pass by-name repeated parameters in Scala? The following code fails to work: scala> def foo(s: (=> String)*) = { <console>:1: error: no by-name parameter type allowed here def foo(s: (=> String)*) = { ^ Is there any other way I could pass a variable number of by name parameters to the method? ...