[Haskell-cafe] newbie - IO issues (of course)

[Stepan Golosunov]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 02:38:31PM +1000, Geoffrey King wrote:
> I have been work my way through "Haskell The Craft of Functional 
> Programming", all was fine until IO (chapter 18). That is causing me 
> bafflement.
> 
> I am trying to write a totally trivial program that reads a series of 
> integers from the console until it gets a zero, then returns the series 
> of integers as a list.
> 
> I am down to randomly editing my code, never a good sign. Any clues 
> would be appreciated, My code so far, which clear doesn't work, is:
> getInt :: IO Int
> getInt = do
>            putStr "Enter number (zero to quit)"
>            line <- getLine
>            return (read line :: Int)
> 
> anIntList :: [Int]

anIntList is an IO action which reads a list, and as such has type
IO [Int], not [Int].

> anIntList =
>        do
>            let n = getInt

You should use "n <- getInt" to perform getInt and read integer into n.
"let n = getInt" just says that n is an IO action which reads integer,
not that integer itself.

>            if n == 0
>                then return []
>                else return (n : anIntList)

As anIntList is not a list this won't work. You should perform anIntList
and then use its result:
                   do
                     list <- anIntList
                     return (n : list)