[Haskell-cafe] Reversing a string of words: C# v Perl V Ruby v Haskell

Steve Downey sdowney at gmail.com
Wed Dec 13 20:12:01 EST 2006


ok, i'll bite. why should i prefer join rather than concat in the list
monad. and, moreover, why is this a lambdabot trick?

i suspect that the answer actually has a deep connection to the
'dummies' thread next door.  while any program that produces the right
result is correct, there are some that are more correct than others. a
good introductory guide to haskell should lead you in that direction.

reasoning by analogy, for c++, andy koenig's accelerated c++ had a
huge impact on teaching c++ because it didn't start with C or pidgen
c++, but instead required the student to accept that many mechanisms
would be explained later, but that they should be used -now-.

i suspect that being biased towards higher order functions, and
writing new functions such that monads (although the more i learn i
think that should be typeclasses) can take advantage of those
functions, is the skill that needs to be learned / taught. the
equivalent of the central dogma of OO, where it's all about objects
having identity, state , and behavior.

On 12/13/06, Donald Bruce Stewart <dons at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> ulfn:
> >
> > On Dec 13, 2006, at 3:54 AM, Yitz Gale wrote:
> >
> > >Nice. Here is something similar:
> > >
> > >reverseWords = concat . reverse . groupBy eqsp
> > >  where eqsp x y = isSpace x == isSpace y
> >
> > This can be made even nicer using the 'on' function [1]:
> >
> > reverseWords = concat . reverse . groupBy ((==) `on` isSpace)
> >
> > [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2006-November/006156.html
>
> Lambdabot trick(tm), use 'join' in the [] monad, instead of 'concat'
>
>     join . reverse . groupBy ((==) `on` isSpace)
>
> -- Don
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