While completing HW 2, you probably spent a lot of time writing explicitly recursive functions. At this point, you might think that’s what Haskell programmers spend most of their time doing. In fact, experienced Haskell programmers hardly ever write recursive functions!

How is this possible? The key is to notice that although recursive functions can theoretically do pretty much anything, in practice there are certain common patterns that come up over and over again. By abstracting out these patterns into library functions, programmers can leave the low-level details of actually doing recursion to these functions, and think about problems at a higher level—that’s the goal of wholemeal programming.

This lecture will cover these recursive patterns, the haskell abstractions that make them possible and where to find these library functions in the prelude. We'll also take a tangent into the different between total and partial functions and why you should care about the difference.

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