Functional Programming in C++

Overview

This repository contains my attempt to explore basic functional programming in C++. It builds on the availability of λ's and variadic templates (among other things).

One self-imposed limitation was to avoid weirdsyntax or to overload operators away from their semantics.

The goal is to provide some examples of the us of functional techniques in C++ using existing language features and libraries.

This does not cover template meta-programming in case you were wondering.

Why

It's a great way to explore functional programming and C++, neither of which are well served by this approach.

I primarily use it as a test bench and don't intend to turn this into some sort of library.

###Build

Use the latest version of gcc.I've build this with gcc 4.8 on mac osx 10.8.4.
Clone the repo.
Run make in the src directory.
run ../bin/main or ../bin/main all
../bin/main is a very primitive 'repl' which allows you to run the test functions.

What

./src

The main file in the source directory contains a 'repl' and a set of registered test functions.

The .cpp files contain simple example code for the functional concepts in the header. So bracket.cpp contains example code for bracket.hpp and bracket_helper.hpp

./docs

This directory contains .tex files. These document provide more background for the code. pp-fp-1.tex discusses basic functional programming available in C++. pp-fp-2.tex discusses more advanced concepts.

pp-fp-1.tex was submitted to pragpub for publication.

Related Work

I've been able to track down two articles which discuss functional programming in C++.

Work by Yannis and McNamara circa early 2000 http://people.cs.umass.edu/~yannis/fc++/
Work by David Sankel circa 2010. http://zao.se/~zao/boostcon/10/2010_presentations/thu/funccpp.pdf

Yannis and McNamara develop a library using C++ as it existed circa 2000. Interesting, but you need to stay within their framework.

Sankel uses boost to implement advanced functional programming concepts in C++.