[Haskell-cafe] extreme newbie: hugs prompt vs load module

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello George,

Wednesday, August 23, 2006, 6:16:12 PM, you wrote:

> I'm confused about what sort of things I can type at the interpreter
> prompt, and what things have to be loaded as a module.  I keep trying
> to treat the prompt like a lisp or python REPL, which is obviously
> wrong.  Can someone set me straight?

in hugs you can only type expressions: such as "2*2" or "prod [1..10]".
although there is a trick what sometimes help:

let fac n = prod [1..n] in fac n

it's also an expression, after all :)

in ghci you can define functions with 'let'

you can find more information about this in appropriate user guides,
what is part of your installations and is also available online

> Is there another tutorial that might be more appropriate for me?

"yet another haskell tutorial" commonly considered as more "gentle"
than "gentle introduction"

you can find "Getting started" and "Books and tutorials" links on the
haskell.org. First page includes the most recommended books/tutorials
while second contains more detailed explanations about their contents

> I am finding haskell quite appealing.  I hope to start writing real (if
> small) applications to do some data analysis from our Postgres DB.  Any
> hints?

haskell.org -> "libraries and tools" -> "databases"

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com