[Haskell-cafe] Newbie question on iterating over IO list

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 6/20/06, Taro Ikai <taro at ikaisan.com> wrote:
> Here's a code fragment I have from working with Hal Daume's "Yet Another
> Haskell Tutorial". I cannot figure out how to iterate over the result
> from askForNumbers that returns "IO [Integer]", and print them.
>
> The "<-" operator seems to take IO off of the results from actions like
> getContents, which returns type "IO String", but I cannot seem to use it
> to take IO off of lists with it. What am I supposed to do?
>
> Also, as a side question, what should I be returning from the do function?
>
> >>>code>>>>
>
> module Main
>     where
>
> import IO
>
> main = do
>   hSetBuffering stdin LineBuffering
>   s <- askForNumbers   {-- This compiles --}
>   map show s           {-- But this doesn't. Why? --}

s is a list of numbers, "map show s" is a list of Strings. It is not
an IO [Strings] so you can't use it like an action.
Think about what you're trying to do here, you map "show" on a list of
ints, but what do you do with the result? Nothing. Why would you
*want* the above to compile? It would just convert a bunch of numbers
into strings and then forget about them!
So what you want is probably something like:

let xs = map show s

The rule of thumb is, "use 'let' for regular values, and (<-) for actions".

If you want to print all of them you could do something like:

printList [] = return ()
printList (x:xs) = do putStrLn x
                             printList xs

On the other hand, this operation seems generally useful, so why not
generalise it a bit?

mapAction [] = return ()
mapAction a (x:xs) = do a x
                                    mapAction a xs


And in fact, this function already exists! It's called mapM_ (the M is
for Monad).
You could use this by passing in "putStrLn" as the action to this function.

/S
-- 
Sebastian Sylvan
+46(0)736-818655
UIN: 44640862