Abstract

Traditional loop iteration structures, such as for and while, are neither modular nor composable. However, loop combinators in functional programming languages, such as map and filter, are both modular and composable. Unfortunately, loop combinators aren’t generic. Hence, you have to create a new set of loop combinators for each underlying data structure, such as lists and streams. Transducers, introduced by Rich Hickey for Clojure, are composable generic data structures which reify a loop. In addition, they can be very efficient as they enable stream fusion and tail call optimization.

In this talk we present a different way of thinking about Clojure transducers. We show how to import transducers into typed functional programming languages such as Haskell and OCaml and we demonstrate some of the uses of transducers which makes programming simpler. Finally, we compare our ideas with related work in the field. Although our ideas are not novel yet we hope that you take away some valuable information from our talk.