[Haskell-cafe] Software Tools in Haskell

[Tillmann Rendel]

Hi Tommy,

> detab is one of the programs I do not like.  I kept the "direct 
> translation" approach up through that, but I think it really hides the 
> simplicity there; detab copies its input to its output replacing tabs 
> with 1-8 spaces, based on where the tab occurs in a line.  The only 
> interesting state dealt with is the count of characters on each line, 
> but that gets hidden, not emphasized.
> 
> On the other hand, I'm not looking for one-liners; I really want clarity 
> as opposed to cleverness.

I would do a simple, imperative feeling detab using a recursive [Char] 
processing function:

detab :: Int -> String -> String
detab width text = detab' width text where
   detab' tab [] = []
   detab' tab ('\n' : text) = '\n'              :  detab' width   text
   detab' tab ('\t' : text) = replicate tab ' ' ++ detab' width   text
   detab' 1   (char : text) = char              :  detab' width   text
   detab' tab (char : text) = char              :  detab' (tab-1) text

main = interact (detab 4)

In Haskell, using IO all over the place is the opposite of clarity, even 
in imperative feeling code wich basically encodes a main loop.

     Tillmann