Thomas Schilling wrote:
Levi Stephen wrote:
I'm was wondering how most people work during when designing a functional
program. Do you create data structures/types first? Do you work from some type
signatures?
But there's a third thing that you can
do, other than start implementing: think about the laws/properties that
should hold. That's not always simple, in fact, it rarely is.
Yes, the classic approach: systematically derive programs from their
specification. The classic paper on that is
Paul Hudak. The Design of a Pretty-printing Library.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/hughes95design.html
with a follow-up
Philip Wadler. A prettier printer.
http://decenturl.com/homepages.inf.ed/wadler-98-prettier-printer
The man who derives all his programs from specification is Richard
Bird. You may want to have a look at his recent sudoku solver
Richard Bird. A program to solve Sudoku.
Slides: http://icfp06.cs.uchicago.edu/bird-talk.pdf
where he starts with an apparently correct but hopelessly slow
specification and transforms it into a blazingly fast one. His
introduction to Haskell
Richard Bird.
Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskel (2nd edition).
http://decenturl.com/amazon/bird-introduction-functional
emphasizes the classic style, too.
You may think "this is all nice, but my problem is too 'soft' for
mathematical laws and properties and such". Well, if you don't search,
you won't find. Here's an example for a "soft" problem domain:
Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, Julian Seward.
Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering.
http://decenturl.com/research.microsoft/spj-financial-contracts
Of course, the laws "of nature" governing your problem domain may be
hard to find, so it may be worth to "just implement" and let some "law
intuition" guide you. Well-known example: darcs.
Regards,
apfelmus
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