Functional Programming

• Graduate Level (Master)
• Prof. Dr. Wolfgang De Meuter

The course is entirely devoted to pure functional programming (i.e. programming without assignments and standard imperative I/O-facilities). Functional programming languages have a number of scientific advantages over imperative languages, such as e.g. inductive reasoning. A first goal of the course is to grasp why this is the case. Functional programming languages are abundant but in this course, we will use Haskell. A second goal is to obtain a thorough understanding of this language. The third goal is to provide the students with a vocabulary of standard functional programming techniques which allow functional languages to express programs with the same complexity and functionality as imperative and object-oriented ones do.

This is not an introductory course on programming. Students are expected to be acquainted with “higher order programming” in the style advocated by languages like Scheme. Elementary notions of theoretical computer science (parsing, grammars, computability) are also taken for granted.

Please access the Pointcarre Page for this course.