Motivation

Most of todays software is written in imperative programming languages. An alternative is functional programming. The advantages of functional programming are well known [1]. The goal of this course is to teach functional programming to tackle real world programming.

Main features of this course

We will be using Haskell as the programming language for this course. Haskell is the de facto standard when it comes to pure functional programming language.

Tentative list of topics to be covered.

• Basic types : integers characters strings lists
• Data structures
• Type classes
• Monads and Input output
• Combinator Parsers
• Generic Programming
• Real world applications

Here are few haskell programs in case you want to see how it looks like.

Course notes.

Have a look at the lecture wise course notes. The course notes are also available as a darcs repository. In case you want to hack you can use the following command.

• darcs get http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/ppk/teaching/cs653/notes-darcs/testing # Getting for the first time
• darcs pull http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/ppk/teaching/cs653/notes-darcs/testing # pulling in new patches
• darcs send --to=my-email-id@cse.iitk.ac.in repository-url # emailing me

Some useful links

• Haskell homepage
• Online edition of Real world Haskell
• Web programming in Haskell

Some applications written in haskell

• Darcs a version control system
• Xmonad a window manager

Last modified on Tuesday (14 August 2012 12:10:41 UTC)