[Haskell-cafe] Reading showables

[Luke Palmer]

2008/12/7 John Ky <newhoggy at gmail.com>

> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> They're all the same, as you've explained:
>
> Prelude> putStrLn $ (show . read) "123"
> *** Exception: Prelude.read: no parse


The "no parse" is an artifact of defaulting:

Prelude> putstrLn $ (show . read) "()"
()

It's because ghci defaults the free type variables to ().

The signatures for show and read are:

show :: (Show a) => a -> String
read :: (Read a) => String -> a

So when you do show . read, you get String -> String, but where did the a's
go?  What type were they (what type is "read" trying to parse)?  Ghci makes
them (), because it's weird like that.  A compiler will complain that there
is an unconstrained type variable that it doesn't know what to do with.

You can constrain it yourself with something like:

showAs :: (Show a) => a -> a -> String
showAs typ x = show (x `asTypeOf` typ)

Then:

Prelude> putStrLn $ (showAs (undefined::Int) . read) "123"
123

But this situation doesn't arise in practice, because usually you do
something with a value you've read other than just printing it, and that
something will determine the type to read.

Luke
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20081207/6848b15b/attachment.htm