Description:

This course introduces students into the techniques of functional
programming, the advantages and disadvantages of this programming
paradigm, and its use in practice. This approach is declarative in the
sense that the programmer symbolically describes the problem to be
solved, rather than specifying the exact sequence of operations
required to solve it. It allows focusing on the essence of the solved
problem and implementing even more complex algorithms compactly.
Functional programming has notable advantages for parallelization and
automated verification of algorithms, and the most useful functional
programming concepts are increasingly often introduced to standard
programming languages. Because of the focus of functional programming
on symbols, rather than numbers, functional programming has been
heavily used in in artificial intelligence fields, such as agent
systems or symbolic machine learning.

This course is also part of the inter-university programme prg.ai Minor. It pools the best of AI education in Prague to provide students with a deeper and broader insight into the field of artificial intelligence. More information is available at https://prg.ai/minor.

Contents:

1. Introduction to declarative programming languages. Comparison to
classical imperative languages. Main principles and practical
applications of functional programming.
2. LISP: basic constructions of the language, atoms, lists, recursion
3. LISP: basic language idioms, atoms, lists, recursion
3. LISP: built-in functions, data structures, lambda abstraction
4. LISP: built-in high-order functions
5. LISP: infinite data structures, closures
6. Introduction to Lambda calculus, relation to functional programming
7. Equivalence of functional programming to Turing machine
8. Types in functional languages, their role and consequences to the
expressive power of the languages, typed Lambda calculus
9. Haskell: types, patterns, built-in functions, lambda abstraction
10. Haskell: lazy evaluation, partial function application
11. Haskell: monads
12. Automated optimizations in functional programming, formal
verification of functional programs
13. Functional programming and parallel computation
14. Functional constructs in popular programming languages and tools

Recommended literature:

Hudak, Paul, and Joseph H. Fasel. "A gentle introduction to Haskell." ACM Sigplan Notices 27.5 (1992): 1-52.

Harvey, Brian, and Matthew Wright. Simply Scheme: introducing computer science. Mit Press, 1999.

Abbreviations used:

Semester:

• W ... winter semester (usually October - February)
• S ... spring semester (usually March - June)
• W,S ... both semesters

Mode of completion of the course:

• A ... Assessment (no grade is given to this course but credits are awarded. You will receive only P (Passed) of F (Failed) and number of credits)
• GA ... Graded Assessment (a grade is awarded for this course)
• EX ... Examination (a grade is awarded for this course)
• A, EX ... Examination (the award of Assessment is a precondition for taking the Examination in the given subject, a grade is awarded for this course)

Weekly load (hours per week):

• P ... lecture
• C ... seminar
• L ... laboratory
• R ... proseminar
• S ... seminar