[Haskell-cafe] New to Haskell

Spencer Janssen sjanssen at cse.unl.edu
Tue Dec 18 06:08:29 EST 2007


On Tuesday 18 December 2007 01:31:59 Cristian Baboi wrote:
> A few days ago, for various reasons, I've started to look at Haskell.
> At first I was quite impressed, after reading some FAQ, and some tutorials.
> Evrything was nice and easy ... until I've started writing some code on my
> own.
>
> What I should have been told about upfront:
>
> - the syntax for an expression
> - the syntax for a block
> - the adhoc syntax rules (how to distinguish among a tuple and a
> pharanthesized expression and how to find the start and end of a block for
> example )
>
> - the fact that lambda expressions are not the same thing as "algebraic
> data" values
> - what guarantees are made by the LANGUAGE that an IO action (such as  do
> putStrLn "Hello world" ) is not performed twice
> - the lambda expressions can be written (input) but cannot be printed
> (output)
>
> The biggest problem for me, so far, is the last one.
>
> Here is some strange example:
>
> module Hugs where
>
> aa::Int
> aa=7
>
> cc:: (Int->Int)->(Int->Int->Int)->Int->(Int->Int)
> cc a op b  =  \x-> case x of  {   _ | x==aa -> x+1 ;  _-> a x `op` b }
>
> f::Int->Int
> f(1)=1
> f(2)=2
> f(_)=3
>
> g::Int->Int
> g(1)=13
> g(2)=23
> g(_)=33
>
> h::[Int->Int] -> Int ->Int
> h  []  x       = x
> h  [rr]  x    =  let { u=Hugs.f ; v=Hugs.g } in  case rr of  {  u  ->
> Hugs.g(x)+aa ; v -> Hugs.f(x)+aa ; _ ->rr (x) + aa }
> h  (rr:ll)  x =  h [rr] x + h (ll) x
>
>
> What I don't understand is why I'm forced to use guards like x==aa in cc,
> when aa is clearly bounded (is 7) and why in function h, the bounded u and
> v become free variables in the case expression.

I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet, so I'll go ahead.  Many of the
questions you ask are well covered by the Haskell Report:

    http://haskell.org/onlinereport/

The report is terse, but quite usable as a reference.  Moreover, it is The
Final Word on all these semantic and syntactic questions.


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen



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