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Programming with Arrows

  • Conference paper
Advanced Functional Programming

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3622))

Abstract

Consider this simple Haskell definition, of a function which counts the number of occurrences of a given word w in a string:

count w = length . filter (==w) . words

This is an example of “point-free” programming style, where we build a function by composing others, and make heavy use of higher-order functions such as filter. Point-free programming is rightly popular: used appropriately, it makes for concise and readable definitions, which are well suited to equational reasoning in the style of Bird and Meertens [2]. It’s also a natural way to assemble programs from components, and closely related to connecting programs via pipes in the UNIX shell.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, S-41296, Göteborg, Sweden

    John Hughes

Authors
  1. John Hughes
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Tartu, J. Liivi 2, EE-50409, Tartu, Estonia

    Varmo Vene

  2. Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, EE-12618, Tallinn, Estonia

    Tarmo Uustalu

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hughes, J. (2005). Programming with Arrows. In: Vene, V., Uustalu, T. (eds) Advanced Functional Programming. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3622. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11546382_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11546382_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28540-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31872-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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