[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell wiki: most popular pages

[Gene A]

Excerpt from Bulat Ziganshin :
> i think that definitions with omitted arguments can be more hrd to
> understand to newbie haskellers, especiallyones who not yet know the
> language. as Tamas suggests, this page can be used to present to such
> newbies taste of Haskell so listing all the parameters may allow to
> omit unnecessary complications in this "first look into language"

Excerpt from Tamas K Papp
>I think I learned to understand and appreciate omitted arguments from
>Hal Daume's Yet Another Haskell Tutorial.  The exercises there are
>just great.

Hi for what it's worth, having recently {still"} trying to grasp all
the nuances of this wonderful Language and coming from an imperative
world where the Variable is King... It would be a really tough stretch
on first look, but as Tamas said, the "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial"
herein mentioned, was along with some other places that the whole
point free concept was put forth, were immediately adopted by me for
many uses... I think any introductory material, would do well to show
the conventional method with explicit arguments  and then followed
with a point free version if applicable.
  As to the base discussion, I feel that any and all string
manipulation functions that are missing would be a great thing to add.
 I came from a backgound of using Icon and Unicon, which are offshoots
of the earlier language Snobol.  Snobol's pattern matching and such on
strings is still unequaled, but Icon/Unicon, both have a facility that
is called string scanning which makes many things that involve search
and replacement trivial.  It has some things that I have already
written using just high level haskell, no C or C++ foreign functions
with wrappers or anything, to emulate such things as the left, right,
and center functions that will give back the string padde to the left
or right, and the center function is merely padded to the left and
right  based on the total field width given.  Also on the same note,
currency functions to do the same with string representations of US
dollar amounts and such, rounding to to decimal places first and then
adding leading zero, and commas for the thousands..{I think I added
that in?? not sure}.
   The functions to quickly substitute one word for another are a
little more problematical, as the most intuitive first step is to use
the function words, but if things are using more than one space
between words that is lost in any easily built function that just
breaks up the words, makes the substitutions to the resulting list,
and then goes on to introduce the spaces back in.. as the original
count of spaces is lost.. would need to make a new function that
breaks up a stream into words that are made up of non-whitespace
chars, and also the subsequent whitespace ones.. so that when put back
together the spacing is the same... more trouble with that if the new
replacement word is longer or shorter.. if it is column oriented data
that would get messed up even worse.....

okay.... done with the rambling,
gene