[Haskell-cafe] Poor libraries documentation

[Derek Elkins]

On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 02:18 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > > Neil is on Windows. Windows doesn't have man pages (or libc).
> >
> > Standard C math library does always contain trigonometric functions -
> > doesn't it?
> 
> My libc (as installed by Visual Studio, and called msvscrt) comes with
> all these functions, but no manpages, and the MSDN (manpages for
> Windows) are too big to install on this machine. I answered my queries
> in the end by googling and finding the GNU libc documentation, but
> thats not where I want it.
> 
> It isn't something that would throw a C programmer off, but it is
> something that could confuse a pure Haskell programmer. And the only
> way I could be sure of radians versus degrees was by trying it out,
> not a great strategy for determining the implementation of functions!

Uh, why not?  Often that's exactly what I do as checking even
conveniently located documentation is more time consuming than just
trying it.