[Haskell-cafe] Newbie:Debugging and Overgeneralization

[Aditya Siram]

I have been working with a Haskell text for the past couple of months or so 
and I have some general problem solving questions.

1. Is there a way to output intermediate values of a calculation? As an 
imperative programmer I have become used to using "System.out"'s or 'cout's 
to check that my function works as intended. I can see no easy way to do 
that in Haskell. The only solution I could come up with was to avoid using 
nested functions except for the most trivial expressions and test all 
expressions in the interpreter. This approach seems to make my code ugly and 
less readable.

2. Haskell is great because it makes abstracting from problem very easy. For 
example, if the problem asks for the area of a square, why not write a 
function to compute the area of all polygons?  find myself falling into the 
trap of generalizing to the point that a simple problem becomes quite a bit 
harder . From a general design perspective should I concentrate on 
abstracting away just enough to solve the problem or solve the harder 
problem in the hoping of reusing that code to make life easier in the 
future?


Thanks....
Deech