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InfoQ Homepage News Article: Beyond Foundations of F#

Article: Beyond Foundations of F#

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Since Robert Pickering published Foundations of F# in May, the language has grown significantly. Besides adding a host of new features, it is being moved from a research project to a fully supported, production-grade release. We asked Robert to discuss some of the new features in F#.

F# is Microsoft's attempt at building a first class .NET language based on functional programming techniques. In development for over two years, it is the first of the Microsoft Research languages to be elevated to product status.

Robert Pickering writes about some of new features in F# that won't be found in any other mainstream .NET language.

The idea of active patterns is to enable you to use the pattern matching syntax with other data structures. Active patterns allow us to build a union type like data structures from the .NET classes, we are then able to pattern match over these data structures. Suppose we have an xml document, it would be nice to be able to pattern match over its nodes. The first step is to create our union like data structure from the .NET types:

Read the full article to learn more about F# and Active Patterns.

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