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

[Taro Ikai]

Sebastian,

Thanks for your help. I learned two things:

o show is not an action, but a function. Using it in the interactive 
mode of GHCI was making me confused.

o To output anything, I need to do 'do'.

-Taro


Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> 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