Skip to main content

C# for Haskell and ML Programmers

An interesting question was posed to /r/Haskell today: is there a quick intro to C# from Haskell programmers?

Well there are plenty of explanations of C#'s basic syntax, classes, structs, etc., but nothing that specifically addresses the functional mindset a Haskell programmer would be starting with, so I wrote a reply providing links to the various familiar concepts from functional programming found in C#, and described various caveats that might be surprising to a Haskell user. I'll reproduce the post here for posterity:

I think there's a reasonable C# subset for functional programming, so if you stick to that you should be able to pick it up relatively quickly. Read up on:

  • LINQ -- you can use the query comprehension syntax, or the regular first-class function syntax. The former is sugar for the latter.
  • Tuples
  • Lambdas and delegates (delegates are first-class functions)
  • Parametric polymorphism is known as generics. You can place generic parameters on methods/functions, and type declarations.
  • The standard System.Func* and System.Action* delegates. These are delegates with generic parameters. Most first-class functions you deal with will be one of these two classes of delegates.
  • Type constraints

Caveats:

  • lambdas and delegates are nominally typed, so you can't implicitly or explicitly coerce a delegate of one type into a delegate of a compatible signature, ie. System.Predicate<int> is signature compatible with System.Func<int, bool>, but they are not interconvertible without doing some magic like I do in my Sasa.Func.Coerce library function.
  • methods and delegates are multiparameter, not curried like in OCaml and Haskell, thus leading to all the Func* and Action* overloads.
  • The "void" return type is not a type, so it can't be used as a generic argument. Hence the need for all the Action* delegate types distinct from the Func* delegate types. Action* differ only in the fact that they return void.
  • generic parameters on methods are strictly more general than generic parameters on delegates (which are types). Method generics support first-class polymorphism, while type declaration generics do not.
  • classes are always implicitly option types, ie. they are nullable, while struct types always have a "valid" value, ie. are not nullable. Struct types are then useful for eliminating null reference exceptions in programs, as long the default struct value is meaningful.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

async.h - asynchronous, stackless subroutines in C

The async/await idiom is becoming increasingly popular. The first widely used language to include it was C#, and it has now spread into JavaScript and Rust. Now C/C++ programmers don't have to feel left out, because async.h is a header-only library that brings async/await to C! Features: It's 100% portable C. It requires very little state (2 bytes). It's not dependent on an OS. It's a bit simpler to understand than protothreads because the async state is caller-saved rather than callee-saved. #include "async.h" struct async pt; struct timer timer; async example(struct async *pt) { async_begin(pt); while(1) { if(initiate_io()) { timer_start(&timer); await(io_completed() || timer_expired(&timer)); read_data(); } } async_end; } This library is basically a modified version of the idioms found in the Protothreads library by Adam Dunkels, so it's not truly ground bre

Building a Query DSL in C#

I recently built a REST API prototype where one of the endpoints accepted a string representing a filter to apply to a set of results. For instance, for entities with named properties "Foo" and "Bar", a string like "(Foo = 'some string') or (Bar > 99)" would filter out the results where either Bar is less than or equal to 99, or Foo is not "some string". This would translate pretty straightforwardly into a SQL query, but as a masochist I was set on using Google Datastore as the backend, which unfortunately has a limited filtering API : It does not support disjunctions, ie. "OR" clauses. It does not support filtering using inequalities on more than one property. It does not support a not-equal operation. So in this post, I will describe the design which achieves the following goals: A backend-agnostic querying API supporting arbitrary clauses, conjunctions ("AND"), and disjunctions ("OR"). Implemen

Easy Automatic Differentiation in C#

I've recently been researching optimization and automatic differentiation (AD) , and decided to take a crack at distilling its essence in C#. Note that automatic differentiation (AD) is different than numerical differentiation . Math.NET already provides excellent support for numerical differentiation . C# doesn't seem to have many options for automatic differentiation, consisting mainly of an F# library with an interop layer, or paid libraries . Neither of these are suitable for learning how AD works. So here's a simple C# implementation of AD that relies on only two things: C#'s operator overloading, and arrays to represent the derivatives, which I think makes it pretty easy to understand. It's not particularly efficient, but it's simple! See the "Optimizations" section at the end if you want a very efficient specialization of this technique. What is Automatic Differentiation? Simply put, automatic differentiation is a technique for calcu