• Latest News
• Purpose of the course
• Practical information
• Teaching
• Contents of the course
  • Week 1:
  • Week 2:
  • Week 3:
  • Week 4:
  • Week 5:
  • Week 6:
  • Week 7:
• Lab Assignments
• Resources
  • Haskell Documentation and Other Resources
  • Haskell Installation (GHC) on your own machine
  • More Reading
  • Old exams
• Examination
• Advice

Latest News

• 2011-01-14 Exam with solutions available See instructions in the course group for how to raise a query about the grading of your exam.
• 2010-12-02 John's lecture (pdf) (pptx)
• 2010-11-29 Minor updates to the info for lab 4 (to reflect the newest version of gtk2hs).
• 2010-11-09 Course representatives: Fatemeh, Shayan, Oxana and Abid.
  These nice people can pass on any feedback you have during the course, and will help with the course evaluation.

• 2010-11-04 Reminder: drop-in times where you can get help:

• 2010-11-04 Minor updates to the code from the lectures, week 2. VerboseCheck module added there too.
• 2010-10-25 Lectures in HC2 (earlier I mistakenly wrote MC2). Handy shortcuts:
  • This page: bit.ly/tda451
  • The course google group: bit.ly/tda451-10

• 2010-10-21 These web pages are in the process of being updated. Important Info: Lectures in HC2 on Tuesdays, 10-12 and Thursdays 13-15.

All participants of the course are expected to join the course google group.

Purpose of the course

The course is an introduction to Functional Programming for students who know how to program. The students come mainly from the masters program at Chalmers and the University of Göteborg.

Practical information

• Instructor: David Sands
• Teaching assistants: Krasimir Angelov and Ann Lillieström
• Text book: I am not recommending a specific textbook this year. For those who like to follow a textbook I can recommend the following:
  • Graham Hutton: Programming in Haskell. A fairly new Haskell book that is a good fit for this course.
  • Simon Thompson: The Craft of Functional programming. A more basic book, but still covering most of the material in the course. It is important that you read the 2nd edition. You can also buy the book at Chalmers bookstore.
  • Real World Haskell New book, also available online. This is more advanced and more oriented towards practical Haskell programming. A good book to have on the shelf if you continue with Haskell.

• Schedule
• Discussion group: [http://groups.google.com/group/chalmers-fp-course-10] This is for discussion among the students about the course. All kinds of questions (and answers) on the content of the course are welcome. You own specific problems with the labs should not be posted here for obvious reasons.

• Do not ruin your reputation by cheating!
  • Here are the Chalmers rules
  • This clarification of coopertion vs cheating applies in this course.

• Lab assignment submisson instructions: The labs are submitted electronically using the Fire system. For instructions on how to use Fire, see the Student documentation for Fire.

Teaching

• Lectures are usually given on Tuesdays 10.00 - 12.00 and Thursdays 13.15 - 15.00. Ideally you should read around the subject of the lectures before.
• You should start to do the exercises before you try with the lab assignments.

Contents of the course

These are from 2009. Minor updates will be made as we go along.

Week 1:

• Intro to Haskell (View)(Print) ; (Thompson: Ch 1-4). (Haskell code from the lecture) Tuples and Lists (View)(Print) ; (Thompson: Ch 5). Datatypes (View)(Print) (Thompson: Ch 14.1-14.2). (Haskell Code).
• Exercises 1: Getting started with Haskell
• Lab Assignment 1

Week 2:

• Lists (View) (Print) (Thompson Ch 5, 6.3, 7) (Haskell Code From Lecture 2010)
• More Data, Lists, Classes (View) (Print) (Haskell Code From Lecture 2010) (Quiz about Classes)

• Abstract Datatypes (View) (Print) (Code) SlowQ(Code) FastQ
• Exercises 2: Recursion and Datatypes
• Lab Assignment 2

• Handy extension to QuickCheck: VerboseCheck Function verboseCheck prints out the randomly generated values as it tests them. This is already in the old versions of QuickCheck (1.x), and will be added to newer versions.

Week 3:

Minor updates to slides and code, 2010

• Programming IO (View)(Print) (Code) (Code: Hangman.hs) (Hutton Ch. 9; Thompson Ch. 18)
• Data Test Generators (View)(Print) (Code: Lecture03B.hs) Quick Check Manual
• Exercises 3: Lists and List Comperhensions

Week 4:

Minor updates to slides and code, 2010

• Higher Order Functions (View)(Print) (Code: Lecture04A)
• Book reading guide (Thompson): See last slide of lectures.
• Recursive Datatypes (View)(Print) (Code: Expr.hs) (Code: ExprVar.hs)
• Exercises 4: IO, Test Data and Properties
• Lab Assignment 3

Week 5:

Slides for Part A updated 2010; code for Part B updated 2010 Code from 2009

• Parsing Expressions (View)(Print)(Code: ReadExpr.hs) (RefactoredParser.hs)

• Parsing Expressions Monad Style (View)(Print) (Code: RefactoredReadExpr.hs) (Code: ReadExprMonadic.hs) (Code: Parsing.hs) (Code: MaybeMonad.hs)
• Reading: (Tutorial article on Monadic Parsing)
• Exercises 5: Recursive Datatypes

Week 6:

2010: Minor updates throughout

• Tuesday: Guest lecturer Krasimir Angelov: Programming GUIs (Tutorial on GTK2Hs) (Lab assignment 4) (Krasimir's Slides) (Code to go with slides)

• Thursday: Guest lecture: John Hughes will talk about Unit testing and Test Driven Development.

Week 7:

Some additions for 2010

• Tuesday: Laziness (View)(Print) (Code)
• Thursday: Guest lecture: Magnus Carlsson

Lab Assignments

In the table below you will find links to lab assignments which have to be handed in. For each assignment have a submission deadline at which you must submit your solutions. If your lab does not pass (incorrect or simply badly coded) then you must resubmit. You have until the final deadline. The final deadline is absolute: it is the last possible date to hand in your solutions. If your solutions are not passed you get no further chances this term.

Please read this link about how to get help!

Ann and Krasimir have open office hours listed below when you can drop in and ask questions about the lab assignments.

These drop-in times are valid from Thursday of week 2 (2010-11-04).

Resources

Haskell Documentation and Other Resources

• Hoogle: Search Haskell APIs by type!
• Tour of Haskell syntax.
• Haskell Hierarchical Libraries.
• A Tour of the Haskell Prelude (Also available in PDF format).

Haskell Installation (GHC) on your own machine

Ghc(i) can be downloaded from its home page.

More Reading

• Haskell Home Page. Everything about Haskell which is worth knowing (and more).
• The Haskell wikibook.
• Gentle Introduction to Haskell. Maybe not so gentle, but concise!
• The Haskell Cheat Sheet. Too long to be called a cheat sheet, but a useful summary of the language.
• Microsoft's new Channel9 lectures on Haskell
• Learn You Haskell for Great Good! Funny but very nice tutorial.
• Beating the averages. This is an entertaining article about Lisp, arguably the first functional programming language.

Old exams

• Dec 2009 (includes solutions)
• Dec 2008; Solutions

Even older exams. These are a bit different from the current style, but there are some useful examples to be found.

• October 2003, January 2004, August 2004, October 2004
• January 2005, October 2006, January 2007

Examination

The examination of the course has two parts: the weekly assignments and a written exam in the end of the course. To pass the course it is necessary to pass all home assignments and the exam. The exam dates are announced on the student portal http://www.student.chalmers.se/ .

• TDA451 Examination : Tuesday 14 Dec 2010 - 14.00, Johanneberg, Length: 4 hours

Advice

• Do not be afraid to ask questions! Many questions seem stupid or superficial; they are often the most interesting ones. Basic misunderstandings often comes to the surface in a question you are afraid to ask.

Some advice which you shouldn't really need:

• check the homepage regularly,
• read about the topic before the lectures (then the lecture is more useful)
• solve the exercises before the exercise sessions (then the exercise session is more useful)
• start with your assignments early since unexpected things happens
• etc...

• Latest News
• Purpose of the course
• Practical information
• Teaching
• Contents of the course
  • Week 1:
  • Week 2:
  • Week 3:
  • Week 4:
  • Week 5:
  • Week 6:
  • Week 7:
• Lab Assignments
• Resources
  • Haskell Documentation and Other Resources
  • Haskell Installation (GHC) on your own machine
  • More Reading
  • Old exams
• Examination
• Advice