Functional Programming

Catalog description

Functional Programming is a very powerful and expressive style of programming which has become extremely popular in the recent years, both in academia and in the software industry. There are good reasons for this success: functional programs are modular by design, and interact through expressive and cleanly specified interfaces, using static typing and pattern matching. As a result, functional programs are generally simpler to reason about, to maintain and to execute in parallel than imperative or object-oriented programs. The purpose of the course will be to provide an advanced introduction to Haskell, a purely functional language used today in the software industry for real-world applications. The language comes with a rigorous semantics and everything one could expect of a functional programming language: static type inference, lazy evaluation, type classes, explicit handling of effects using monads, and concurrency primitives and abstractions. We will take the opportunity of this course on Haskell to cover elements of formal language theory, with the implementation in Haskell of a parser, pretty-printer and interpreter for a small imperative language. Prereq: CSCI-SHU 2314 Discrete Math and CSCI-SHU 210 Data Structures Fulfillment: CS elective.