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. Please note that you cannot include this course as part of a degree which already contains TDA555 (Introduction to Functional Programming). The contents are too similar (although the exam for this course is more demanding). If you took TDA555 or similar please consider TDA342 Advanced Functional Programming

Practical information

• Instructor: David Sands
• Teaching assistants: Evgeny Kotelnikov, Gregoire Detrez, and ASSISTANT3LONG
• Course Representatives: (to be decided)
• Text book: There is no course textbook. For those who like to follow a textbook I can recommend the following:
  • Graham Hutton: Programming in Haskell. A compact and well-written Haskell book that is a good fit for this course.
  • Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! Online and printed versions. Very nice tutorial with humour.
  • Simon Thompson: The Craft of Functional programming. A more basic book with a slower pace but still covering most of the material in the course. I recommend the 3rd edition which has some coverage of quickCheck (a testing approach used extensively in the course). Also available at the Chalmers bookstore.
  • Real World Haskell 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. This is the course book for the Advanced Functional Programming course.

• Schedule
• Discussion group: [https://goo.gl/BN3731] 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.
  • If you want to use a free repository for hosting lab code, please use one which supports private repositories (i.e. not github). I suggest Bitbucket.

• Lab assignment submisson instructions: The labs are submitted electronically using the New Fire system.

• Drop-in times where you can get help with the labs are announced on the course group pages.

(To be decided; from week 2)

Contents of the course

These are from TDA452 2014. Content will be similar for this year. The timing needs to be adjusted for the new study schedule. Minor updates will be made as we go along.

Week 1:

• Intro to Haskell (View)(Print) ; Tuples and Lists (View)(Print) ; (Haskell Code from Lecture)
  Datatypes (View)(Print) (Haskell Code 2011).
• Exercises 1: Getting started with Haskell
• Lab Assignment 1

Week 2:

• Lists (View) (Print) (Haskell Code 2011)
• More Data, Lists, Classes (View) (Print)
  (Quiz about Classes)
• Higher Order Functions (View)(Print) (Code from 2011: Lecture02B)

• Exercises 2: Recursion and Datatypes
• Lab Assignment 2

Week 3:

• Programming IO (View)(Print) (Code 2012) (Code 2012: Hangman-2012.hs) (Code 2014: Hangman.hs) (Code 2014: GameLogic.hs) (Hutton Ch. 9; Thompson Ch. 18; RWH Ch 7.)
• Data Test Generators (View)(Print)
  • Quick Check Manual (somewhat out of date!)
  • Test.QuickCheck API
  • Testing Chapter from "Real World Haskell"
• Exercises 3: Lists and List Comperhensions

Week 4:

• Abstract Datatypes (Lecture not given in 2013) (View) (Print) (Code) SlowQ(Code) FastQ

• Recursive Datatypes (View)(Print) (Code 2012) (Code 2012 part 2)

• Parsing Expressions (View)(Print)(2011 ReadExpr.hs) (2011 RefactoredParser.hs) (2011 RefactoredReadExpr.hs)

• Exercises 4: IO, Test Data and Properties
• Lab Assignment 3

Week 5:

• Parsing Expressions Monad Style (View)(Print). Slides from 2014 (slightly different order) (View) (Print) (Code 2013: Parsing.hs) (Code 2013: L05A.hs) (Code 2013: Stack.hs)

• Reading: (Tutorial article on Monadic Parsing)

• Laziness (View)(Print) (Code 2011)

• Exercises 5: Recursive Datatypes

Week 6:

(2014 we had a Guest lecture by Anton Ekblad, who told us about Haste, Haskell for Web Applications. Haste is the recommended approach to build simple GUIs for your project. It is also a cool research project in its own right. Anton will give us a tutorial on getting simple stuff done with Haste, and give us some insights into why it exists and where the project is going.)

• Introduction to Haste
• Haste Resources
• Material from the lecture: slides, Code (Logic.hs), Code (pong.hs).

• (OLD) Parallel Programming (Not given in 2012) (View)(Print) (Code 2011)

Week 7+:

No lectures (Project work!)

Revision: coding of last year's exam will be made available online in early January.

Recent exams

• Exam from 2013,
  • Version with inlined solutions
• Exam from 2012,
  • Solutions
• Exam from 2010,
  • Solutions 2010,
• List of Some Standard Functions Suppied in the Exam

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. Your first submission is expected to be a serious attempt to complete the lab. If your submission 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.

Note that the deadlines are firm and are controlled strictly by the lab reporting system. Therefore you must submit by the deadlines.

Lab 4 is a mini project, to be presented to the graders around 16-18 December (date to be confirmed). A project proposal (a brief description of the plan) is to be submitted latest Friday 4 December for feedback (if necessary). In 2014 about 50% of the projects were required to make some small changes for later submission. See the lab description for more information.

Resources

Please read this link about how to get help!

Evgeny and Gregoire 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 Monday of week 2.

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).
• List of Some Standard Functions that you are given in the exam

Haskell Installation (GHC) on your own machine

We recommend installing the Haskell Platform. Quote: The Haskell Platform is the easiest way to get started with programming Haskell. It comes with all you need to get up and running. Think of it as "Haskell: batteries included".

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 Channel9 lectures on Haskell
• Beating the averages. This is an entertaining article about Lisp, arguably the first functional programming language.

Old exams (TDA 451)

• 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/ .

• TDA452 Examination: 14 Jan 2016 14:00 in "Maskin"-salar
  07 Apr 2016 14:00 in Johanneberg

Length: 4 hours

Some advice which you shouldn't really need:

• check the google group 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...

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  • Purpose of the course
  • Practical information
  • 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 (TDA 451)
  • Examination