[Haskell-beginners] haskell variables - or not

[Kyle Murphy]

Well, the short answer is sort of. The long answer is that you can't  
really have variables declared outside of a function definition. When  
you do something like:
x = 5
what you're really doing is declaring a new function x that takes no  
arguments and returns the constant 5.

On Jul 25, 2009, at 12:25 AM, Duke Normandin <dukeofperl at ml1.net> wrote:

> Hello....
>
> I'm 2 days into Haskell. NOT new to Perl, PHP, M(umps), TCL,  
> newLISP. I'm
> using "YAHT.pdf" as an intro to Haskell. Here's a quote:
>
> [quote]
> ... if you have a value x, you must not think of x as a register, a
> memory location or anything else of that nature. x is simply a name,  
> just as
> Hal  is my name. You cannot arbitrarily decide to store a different  
> person in
> my name any more than you can arbitrarily decide to store a  
> different value in
> x. This means that code that might look like the following C code is  
> invalid
> (and has no counterpart) in Haskell:
>
> int x = 5;
> [/quote]
>
> So is fair to say that an expression in Haskell like:
>
> x = 5
>
> is more like a constant in imperative languages - say Perl? E.g.
>
> use constant SECONDS_PER_DAY => 86400;
> --
> duke
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