[Haskell-beginners] Hello World

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 26/03/14 22:40, John M. Dlugosz wrote:
> I'm learning Haskell as a background activity, and just wanted to introduce myself and get 
> the list subscription stuff sorted out.
> 
> My primary machine runs Windows 7.  I have Haskell Platform working OK including GCHi-Win, 
> but could not get Lekseh to work.  However, trying that showed me the world of Cabel, and 
> I have yet to find an introduction/tutorial on that.  The Haskell Platform comes with some 
> libraries, but doesn't have a Cabel tool or anything I'd reconize as a repository, like 
> Lekseh was setting up.

Hi.

Firstly, the tools in question are called ‘Leksah’ and ‘Cabal’ (note the
‘a’ as the second from last letter).

Regarding your questions, there is a Cabal user guide at [1]. I don't
know for sure but I imagined that Haskell Platform comes with Cabal.
There are two thinks people think of when they say Cabal: there is Cabal
the library and cabal-install, the binary. You can find very quick
demonstration of cabal-install at [2] although I'm sure that the user
guide covers it. cabal-install is the actual tool that will go out to
the world and fetch packages for you.

Normally to run cabal-install, we simply run the ‘cabal’ command. I see
that Leksah is on Hackage which means that in theory, one should be able
to just invoke ‘cabal install leksah’. I don't know how usable it is
today so if you somehow fail to install it or don't like it, I'd advise
looking at getting a plugin for Haskell for your existing editor. I
don't know about vim but a popular choice for Haskell is haskell-mode.
See the Haskell wiki page on emacs if you're interested[3]. Hopefully
Leksah works just fine for you.

> It's said that the best feature of Perl is CPAN.  I suppose Cabel is Haskell's equivalent 
> of that, or aims to be.  So, what's up with that?  Starting from a blank prompt (that can 
> run ghc successfully) now what?

I can't say whether it's like CPAN but from the vague memory of using
CPAN a along time ago, I think it would be, yes.

> —John
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> Beginners at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
> 

[1]: http://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/
[2]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal-Install
[3]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Emacs

-- 
Mateusz K.