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Professional F# 2.0
book

Professional F# 2.0

by Ted Neward, Aaron C. Erickson, Talbott Crowell, Richard Minerich
June 2010
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
432 pages
10h 44m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Professional F# 2.0

Chapter 8. Classes

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

  • Defining classes

  • Creating fields and constructors

  • Declaring members

  • Using access modifiers

  • Using type extensions

For the experienced C# or Visual Basic developer, this chapter will likely be the least conceptually new material found thus far in the book — as the F# reference states clearly, object-oriented programming is the dominant paradigm of the .NET ecosystem, and classes form the core means by which .NET developers organize their code. As a result, classes and objects are (or at least, should be) familiar ground, and F# supports the full range of object-oriented facilities offered by other languages. Although the F# syntax frequently expresses the same concept in a more terse fashion, overall the developer experienced with objects in C# or Visual Basic will find classes in F# to be a comfortable transition.

A larger danger lurks — as a fusion of both objects and functions, F# offers more than "just" another syntax for building object-oriented applications. As the danger of C++ was in using it as "a better C" and not seeing its deeper capabilities, the danger to the budding F# developer is in using it as "a better C#" and not seeing beyond the object facilities, thus ignoring the potential power of the synthesis of object and function.

BASICS

To create a new, empty, class, F# uses (again) the type keyword, and class/end markers to indicate the beginning and end of the class declaration:

type Example =
    class
    end

This introduces a new class into ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470528013Purchase book