Haskell meets Evariste

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how applying an easy-hard-split formal strategy improves the clarity and design of Haskell functions, enhancing documentation and reusability in functional programming.

Contribution

It introduces a general, informal strategy for improving software documentation and design in Haskell, applicable to program analysis and synthesis.

Findings

Haskell functions benefit from the easy-hard-split strategy

Improved clarity and conceptual design in documentation

Strategy is applicable to other functional programming languages

Abstract

Since its birth as a new scientific body of knowledge in the late 1950s, computer programming has become a fundamental skill needed in many other disciplines. However, programming is not easy, it is prone to errors and code re-use is key for productivity. This calls for high-quality documentation in software libraries, which is quite often not the case. Taking a few Haskell functions available from the Hackage repository as case-studies, and comparing their descriptions with similar functions in other languages, this paper shows how clarity and good conceptual design can be achieved by following a so-called easy-hard-split formal strategy that is quite general and productive, even if used informally. This strategy is easy to use in functional programming and can be applied to both program analysis and synthesis.