[Haskell-cafe] Doubting Haskell

[John Meacham]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 05:04:53PM -0800, Donn Cave wrote:
> But in Haskell, you cannot read a file line by line without writing an
> exception handler, because end of file is an exception!  as if a file does
> not normally have an end where the authors of these library functions
> came from?

Part of it is that using 'getLine' is not idiomatic haskell when you
don't want to worry about exceptions. Generally you do something like

doMyThing xs = print (length xs)

main = do
        contents <-  readFile "my.file"
        mapM_ doMyThing (lines contents)


which will call 'doMyThing' on each line of the file, in this case
printing the length of each line.

or more succinctly:

main = readFile "my.file" >>= mapM_ doMyThing . lines


        John

--
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈