[Haskell-beginners] Questions on type declarations

[brandon s allbery kf8nh]

On Friday, 5 October 2012 at 19:55, thorsopia at lavabit.com wrote:
> - getArgs :: IO [String]
> 
> It can get several params, but its type declaration looks like it gets
> none.
> 
> 

It doesn't get any Haskell parameters; it retrieves OS-level (not Haskell-level) parameters to the program.  If you know Perl, it's the difference between @_ and @ARGV; if Python, the difference between local parameters and sys.argv.  You might infer from the fact that other languages also distinguish, that there is an actual difference between function parameters and program parameters; if you are not clear on this, you will need to figure it out regardless of the language you're working with.
> - dispatch :: [(String, [String] -> IO ())]
Looks to me like it's described fairly well by the text.  What is your confusion?

It is an association list:  a list of pairs, the first element being a key and the second being a value.  The value in this case is a function which takes a list of strings and produces an IO action.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix/linux, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure          http://sinenomine.net


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