update in-place

[Ketil Malde]

"Cagdas Ozgenc" <co19@cornell.edu> writes:

> Could you help me on this notation?

Perhaps?

>> data Foo = Foo { a :: Int, b :: String }

This declares a Foo constructor with two named fields, and Int "a" and
a String "b".  This is equivalent to declaring

        data Foo = Foo Int String

but with a couple of extra features added, among others that
you automatically get defined functions "a" and "b" which take a Foo
object and return the values of the respective parts.

>> instance Show Foo where
>>   show f = show (a f) ++ " " ++ show (b f)

...so the (a f) and (b f) parts are just extracting the relevant
information from the Foo. 

If you know Lisp, it's fairly similar to defstruct.
 
-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants