Re^5: short sorts

[Arunbear]

in reply to Re^4: short sorts
in thread short sorts

I've been trying to learn Haskell for greater good. It's a functional language, which (among other things) means functions are first class citizens: you can pass them as arguments to other functions, return them from functions, and easily combine them with other functions.

e.g. whereas in Perl you can create a new string with

$foo = $bar . $ram . $ewe;

in Haskell you can create a new function with

f = g . h . i

(assuming all the argument types match up).

That's what the Compose function I wrote does. I thought of doing that after noticing how similar your various sort functions were, and how they could be built by composing/layering basic operations on top of one another.

I'm not suggesting you write your code like that, I wrote it mainly out of curiosity to see what such a functional style would look like in Perl.

[Lady_Aleena]

I am very happy that I gave you something with which to experiment. If you think of anything else you want this to do, please let me see! :)

[topher]

If you're really interested in functional style programming in Perl, you should check out Higher Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus. The whole book is about applying functional programming techniques and style to Perl. It's a pretty amazing book. It's also available free online. Hard to beat that.

[Arunbear]

I've got a copy already. It is very educational, but doesn't have much to say about composing functions (as far as I can tell).