Module Information

The module will be taught using two 1 hour lectures per week, one of which is in a conventional lecture room, and the other is in a computer laboratory so that short presentations can be interspersed with practical demonstrations. There will also be a one hour practical each week starting from week 2, with demonstrator support.
Week 1: Introduction and types: resources, module structure, the programming environments. Basic types (Ints, Floats, Chars, Strings). The interpreter, and the evaluation of simple expressions. Editing, saving and loading code.
Week 2: Language constructs: How we write Haskell programs. Variables, local definitions, functions, choice, etc. Comments. Evaluation of expressions rather than sequencing of instructions.
Week 3: Lists and tuples: The basic data structures. Tuples as "small objects" and as structured types (via type synonyms). The structure of lists. Functions on lists. The use of map/filter etc. rather than looping. List comprehensions.
Week 4: Recursion. Definition, examples, recursive thinking. Comparison to iteration.
Week 5: Higher order functions. Producing functions and consuming/using/applying functions. The types of functions.
Week 6: Data types. Defining new types. Why new data types are useful. The separation of data and functions. Abstraction via data, functions and modules.
Week 7: Mid semester in-class test. Laziness and evaluation order. Halting and efficiency.
Week 8: IO and purity. More on evaluation order. Side effects.
Week 9: Reasoning, proof and testing. Including HUnit and QuickCheck or similar frameworks.
Week 10: Review and revision classes