[Haskell-beginners] <-

[Karl Voelker]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Patrick Redmond <plredmond at gmail.com>wrote:

> IO actions are given liberal coverage throughout the chapter, however
> it is never mentioned whether the value-extractor syntax (<-) has a
> type or not.
>

What sorts of things have types? Values have types, but x <- getLine is not
a value. I will elaborate.


> main = do
>     x <- getLine
>     putStrLn $ reverse x
>
>
As mentioned by others, this can be de-sugared into:

main = getLine >>= \x -> putStrLn $ reverse x


> In this little program, getLine has type "IO String" and x has type
> "String". This implies to me that (<-) has type "IO a -> a". However,
> GHCI chokes on ":t (<-)" and Hoogle says it's just a syntactic element
> <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Keywords#.3C->.
>

You are right about the types of getLine and x. But look at the part of the
de-sugared code that corresponds to x <- getLine:

getLine >>= \x ->

This isn't an expression. In fact, it's nothing valid on its own. Since you
can't evaluate it to a value, don't expect it to have a type.

I guess I don't have a specific question, but I was kind of expecting
> it to be a function with a type because everything seems to be a
> function with a type in Haskell... Thanks for listening!
>

There are other things in Haskell which don't have a type. Here's something
very similar to your example:

foo = let x = 3 in x + x

Does "let x = 3" have a type? Does the "=" in there have a type? (The
answer is no, and the reasons are basically the same.)

-Karl V.
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