An Introduction To Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus

Well-respected text for computer science students provides an accessible introduction to functional programming. Cogent examples illuminate the central ideas, and numerous exercises offer reinforcement. Includes solutions. 1989 edition.

This well-respected text offers an accessible introduction to functional programming concepts and techniques for students of mathematics and computer science. The treatment is as nontechnical as possible, assuming no prior knowledge of mathematics or functional programming. Numerous exercises appear throughout the text, and all problems feature complete solutions. 1989 edition.

This handbook with exercises reveals in formalisms, hitherto mainly used for hardware and software design and verification, unexpected mathematical beauty. The lambda calculus forms a prototype universal programming language, which in its untyped version is related to Lisp, and was treated in the first author's classic The Lambda Calculus (1984). The formalism has since been extended with types and used in functional programming (Haskell, Clean) and proof assistants (Coq, Isabelle, HOL), used in designing and verifying IT products and mathematical proofs. In this book, the authors focus on three classes of typing for lambda terms: simple types, recursive types and intersection types. It is in these three formalisms of terms and types that the unexpected mathematical beauty is revealed. The treatment is authoritative and comprehensive, complemented by an exhaustive bibliography, and numerous exercises are provided to deepen the readers' understanding and increase their confidence using types.

Here is an introduction to functional programming and its associated systems. A unique feature is its use of the language Haskell for teaching both the rudiments and the finer points of the functional technique. Haskell is a new, internationally agreed and accepted functional language that is designed for teaching, research and applications, that has a complete formal description, that is freely available, and that is based on ideas that have a wide consensus. Thus it encapsulates some of the main thrusts of functional programming itself, which is a style of programming designed to confront the software crisis directly. Programs written in functional languages can be built up from smaller parts, and they can also be proved correct, important when software has to be reliable. Moreover, a certain amount of parallelism can be extracted from functional languages automatically. This book serves as an introduction both to functional programming and Haskell, and will be most useful to students, teachers and researchers in either of these areas. An especially valuable feature are the chapters on programming and implementation, along with a large number of exercises.

First account of the subject by two of its leading exponents. Essentially self-contained.

This is Volume 7 of Trends in Functional Programming (TFP). It contains a refereed selection of the papers that were presented at TFP 2006: the Seventh Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming. which took place in Nottingham, 19-21 April, 2006. TFP is an international forum for researchers from all functional programming communities spanning the entire width of topics in the field. Its goal is to provide a broad view of current and future trends in functional programming in a lively and friendly setting, thus promoting new research directions related to the field of functional programming and the relationship between functional programming and other fields of computer science. True to the spirit of TFP, the selection of papers in this volume covers a wide range of topics, including dependently typed programming, generic programming, purely functional data structures, function synthesis, declarative debugging, implementation of functional programming languages, and memory management. A particular emerging trend is that of dependently typed programming, reflected by a number of papers in the present selection and by the co-location of TFP and Types 2006.