Book review "The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming" by Kees Doets and Jan van Eijck

Links

• The book's homepage by the authors
• Ordering the book at Amazon

Author (referee)

Ralf Lämmel

Abstract

The textbook by Doets and van Eijck is the first to put a specific programming language systematically to work for presenting a major piece of logic and mathematics. The reader is taken through chapters on basic logic, proof recipes, sets and lists, relations and functions, recursion and co-recursion, the number systems, polynomials and power series, ending with Cantor's infinities. The book uses Haskell for the executable and strongly typed manifestation of various mathematical notions at the level of declarative programming. The book adopts a systematic but relaxed mathematical style (definition, example, exercise, ...); the text is very pleasant to read due to a small amount of anecdotal information, and due to the fact that definitions are fluently integrated in the running text. An important goal of the book is to get the reader acquainted with reasoning about programs.

Bibtex entries

@article{JoLLI06,
 author = "Ralf L{\"a}mmel",
 title  = "{Book review ``The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming'' by Kees Doets and Jan van Eijck}",
 journal = "Journal of Logic, Language and Information",
 year  = 2006,
 note = "To appear"
}

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(C) Ralf Lämmel (Email: ralfla@microsoft.com)