[Haskell-cafe] Re: On the verge of ... giving up!

[Conal Elliott]

More neatly, we can fully separate IO from computation:

    h n = interact $ show . sum . map read . take n . reverse . lines

Better yet go a small step further and make *composable* combinations of IO
& pure computation, as in TV (http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/TV).

Cheers,  - Conal

On 10/14/07, apfelmus <apfelmus at quantentunnel.de> wrote:
>
> Brian Hurt wrote:
> > I mean, contemplate this trivial exercise for a moment: write a program
> > that reads from stdin a series of numbers (one number per line), and
> > writes out the sum of the last n numbers.  This is a trivial problem,
> > and I have no doubt that someone who knows Haskell better than I will
> > reply to this email with a single line of code that does it.
>
> Sorry, I can't resist :)
>
>    main n = print . sum . map read . take n . reverse . lines =<<
> getContents
>
> > I'm not saying that it's impossible to go directly to Haskell, I'm
> > saying that it's just very very hard.
> > [&]
> > I'm going to offer an opinion here that's likely to be controversial
> > (in this forum): people new to functional programming shouldn't
> > learn Haskell first. They should start with either Ocaml or SML first.
> > If it makes it easier to accept this argument, you can consider
> > Ocaml and SML as "Haskell with training wheels".
>
> I don't agree. At least, it was different for myself.
>
> Looking at the line of code above, I can't help it, but I perceive
> Haskell as being the _simplest_ programming language in the whole world.
> I had no trouble learning it (step by step from a book), maybe because
> I've happily thrown away everything I (thought I) knew (about
> programming). The reward was worth it.
>
> Why do people want side effects? Purity is soo much simpler.
>
>
> Regards,
> apfelmus
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20071014/0760ddd7/attachment.htm