Notes on Purely Functional Data Structures

I heard a lot of good things about Mike Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures at UChicago, but didn’t ever take the time to check it out. Lately I’ve missed the heady joy of reading and writing code in a strongly typed functional programming language like Standard ML, so when one of my coworkers at Knewton mentioned he was going to read the book I decided to get a copy for myself.

I’m going to try to read through the whole book and complete as many of the exercises that I can. To help myself keep the commitment, I’m going to follow in Eli Bendersky’s footsteps and post reading notes and exercise solutions along the way, as he did for SICP.

Also, I’ve recently begun to learn Scala, a strongly typed functional language on the JVM with nice features such as algebraic datatypes in the form of case classes, pattern matching, and lazy values. Given the usefulness of these language amenities for exploration of Okasaki’s concepts, I’m going to do the exercises in Scala instead of Standard ML or Haskell.