Research papers/Functional pearls

Functional pearls are elegant, instructive examples of functional programming. They are supposed to be fun, and they teach important programming techniques and fundamental design principles. They traditionally appear in The Journal of Functional Programming, and at ICFP and affiliated workshops.

The history of functional pearls is covered by:

How to Write a Functional Pearl

Richard Bird. ICFP 2006.

Fifteen years of functional pearls

Richard Bird. ICFP 2006.

Strachey's functional pearl, forty years on

Mike Spivey, 2006.

There have been some 64 functional pearls in JFP, and some others at ICFP and the Haskell Workshop. There is also a collection of them in The Fun of Programming.

The pearls tend to concentrate on:

• Examples of program calculation and proof
• Neat presentations of new or old data structures
• Interesting applications and techniques

Online

Functional pearls online:

Enumerating the rationals

Jeremy Gibbons, David Lester and Richard Bird. 2006.

Probabilistic functional programming in Haskell

Martin Erwig and Steve Kollmansberger. 2006.

Marble mingling

Sharon Curtis. 2006.

Strong Types for Relational Databases

Alexandra Silva, Joost Visser. 2006. (Haskell Workshop)

Backtracking, interleaving, and terminating monad transformers

Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan, Daniel P. Friedman, Amr Sabry. 2005.

Scrap your Nameplate

James Cheney. 2005.

Enumerating the strings of regular languages

M. Douglas McIlroy. 2004.

Implicit configurations--or, type classes reflect the values of types

Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan. 2004. (also here)

Global variables in Haskell

John Hughes. 2004. (JFP)

I am not a number -- I am a free variable

Conor McBride, James McKinna. 2004.

Inverting the Burrows Wheeler transform

Richard Bird and Shin-Cheng Mu. 2004.

Parsing permutation phrases

Arthur Baars, Andres Lh and S. Doaitse Swierstra. 2004.

Concurrent distinct choices

Sergio Antoy and Michael Hanus. 2004.

Functional chart parsing of context-free grammars

Peter Ljunglf. 2004.

Type-Safe Cast

Stephanie Weirich. 2004.

Pickler Combinators

Andrew J. Kennedy. 2004.

Parallel Parsing Processes

Koen Claessen. 2004.

Producing all ideals of a forest, functionally

Jean-Christophe Fillitre and Franois Pottier. 2003.

Trouble shared is trouble halved

Richard Bird, Ralf Hinze. 2003

A fresh look at binary search trees

Ralf Hinze. 2002.

The countdown problem

Graham Hutton. 2002.

Packrat parsing: simple, powerful, lazy, linear time, functional pearl

Bryan Ford. 2002.

Unfolding pointer algorithms

Richard Bird. 2001.

Maximum marking problems

Richard Bird. 2001.

Weaving a web

Ralf Hinze and Johan Jeuring. 2001.

Normalization by evaluation with typed abstract syntax

Olivier Danvy, Morten Rhiger and Kristoffer H. Rose. 2001.

Do we need dependent types?

Daniel Fridlender and Mia Indrika. 2001.

Perfect trees and bit-reversal permutations

Ralf Hinze. 2000.

Combinators for breadth-first search

Michael Spivey. 2000

Breadth-First Numbering: Lessons from a Small Exercise in Algorithm Design

Chris Okasaki. 2000.

Deriving Backtracking Monad Transformers

Ralf Hinze. 2000.

Recursive subtyping revealed

Vladimir Gapeyev, Michael Y. Levin, Benjamin C. Pierce. 2000.

Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering

Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, Julian Seward. 2000.

A poor man's concurrency monad

Koen Claessen. 1999.

Power series, power serious

M. Douglas McIlroy. 1999.

Red-black trees in a functional setting

Chris Okasaki. 1999.

Proof-directed debugging

Robert Harper. 1999. (see also Proof-directed debugging: revisited for a first-order version).

Monadic parsing in Haskell

Graham Hutton and Erik Meijer . 1998.

Polytypic unification

Patrik Jansson and Johan Jeuring. 1998.

Diets for fat sets

Martin Erwig. 1998.

Even higher-order functions for parsing or Why would anyone ever want to use a sixth-order function?

Chris Okasaki. 1998.

Lazy wheel sieves and spirals of primes

Colin Runciman. 1997.

Three algorithms on Braun trees

Chris Okasaki. 1997.

The Third Homomorphism Theorem

Jeremy Gibbons. 1996.

Back to Basics: Deriving Representation Changers Functionally.

Graham Hutton, Erik Meijer. 1996.

Drawing Trees

Drawing Trees. 1996.

Deriving Tidy Drawings of Trees

Jeremy Gibbons. 1996. (See also the research report).

Offline

These appear not to be available online, unfortunately. If you know where they live, please link, and move into the 'online' section!

Finding celebrities: A lesson in functional programming

Richard Bird and Sharon Curtis. 2006.

A program to solve Sudoku

Richard Bird. 2006. (slides appear here).

On tiling a chessboard

Richard Bird. 2004.

Linear lambda calculus and PTIME-completeness

Harry G. Mairson. 2004

Functional satisfaction

Luc Maranget. 2004.

Derivation of a logarithmic time carry lookahead addition circuit

John T. O'Donnell and Gudula Rnger. 2004.

Composing fractals

Mark P. Jones. 2004.

Calculating the Sieve of Eratosthenes

Lambert Meertens. Journal of Functional Programming, 14(6):759-763, 2004 (slides)

Formatting: a class act

Ralf Hinze . 2003.

Red-black trees with types

Stefan Kahrs. 2001. (also)

Explaining binomial heaps

Ralf Hinze. 1999.

A pointless derivation of radix sort

Jeremy Gibbons. 1999.

Meertens number

Richard Bird. 1998.

On merging and selection

Richard Bird. 1997. (See also More on Merging and Selection).

On building trees with minimum height

Richard Bird. 1997.

The Zipper

Grard Huet. 1997. (See also The Haskell Wikibook).

On generating unique names

L Augustsson, M Rittri, D Synek. 1994.

Efficient Sets - A Balancing Act

Stephen Adams. 1993.

The Last Tail.

Richard Bird. 1993.

A Symmetric Set of Efficient List Operations.

Rob R. Hoogerwoord, 1992.

Two Greedy Algorithms

Richard Bird, 1992.

On Removing Duplicates

Richard Bird. 1991.