[Haskell-cafe] Printing the function result
Brent Yorgey
byorgey at gmail.com
Wed Jul 25 14:38:46 EDT 2007
On 7/25/07, Alexteslin <alexteslin at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I am going through examples from the textbook and trying them out but some
> don't work.
> For example:
>
> addNum :: Int -> (Int -> Int)
> addNum n = addN
> where
> addN m = n+m
>
> This error message i am getting:
>
> ERROR - Cannot find "show" function for:
> *** Expression : addNum 4
> *** Of type : Int -> Int
Hi,
Printing functions is in general not possible, since given a function f
there is no way to "get at" its implementation.* Functions are like black
boxes. The only way to observe a function is to observe its effect on
various inputs. So you can try (addNum 4) 6, (addNum 4) 0, and so on to
see what the function (addNum 4) does to various Int values.
cheers,
-Brent
*(If there were it would lead to all sorts of fun
non-referential-transparency...)
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