A taste of functional programming — 1

Functional programming has roots in Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus. A functional program is a collection of functions that work together to transform data. Though Lisp brought functional programming to public attention in the 1950s, it was John Bacus’s 1977 Turing Award lecture criticizing the limitations of imperative programming languages that led to a resurgence of of interest in this field. The 1970s and 1980s saw a number of advances, leading to the development of the language Haskell, which carefully combined ideas from many earlier languages. In this article, we explore some basic notions of functional programming via Haskell. Madhavan Mukund has been on the Computer Science faculty at Chennai Mathematical Institute since 1992, where he is currently Professor. His research interests are primarily in formal methods for specifying and verifying computing systems. He is the Secretary of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS) and the National Coordinator of the Indian Computing Olympiad.     

函数编程技术在计算机数学教学中的应用探讨

计算机数学,又称离散数学,是计算机学科的重要专业基础课程。在实际教学中发现,计算机科学专业的学生对该课程感兴趣的不多,多数畏惧其概念多、理论强且抽象。利用一种函数式程序设计语言(Haskell)辅助学生进行计算机数学中相关概念理解及其实际编程实验,主要针对课程教学中代数系统(如群)知识点,通过群定义及其性质验证实验来介绍函数编程技术,可以帮助计算机专业学生更好地学习理解计算机数学课程,并能充分调动其学习积极性和主动性,还可培养学生接受新知识的能力。