[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Probably a trivial thing for people knowing Haskell

[Paul Johnson]

Friedrich wrote:
> Paul Johnson <paul at cogito.org.uk> writes:
>   
>> [...] Because file reading is lazy,
>> each line is only read when it is to be processed, and then gets
>> reaped by the garbage collector.  So it all runs in constant memory.
>>     
> Would you mind to elaborate a bit about it. What's so terrible to open
> one file after the other, reading it line by line and close the file
> thereafter. 
>   
Its not wrong, its just more work.  Also from a structural point of view 
its better to separate the code that reads the files from the code that 
processes the text.  The conventional way forces you to mix them.

>> (By the way, putting in the top level type declarations helps a lot
>> when you make a mistake.)
>>     
> Well I have my problems with that. Probably it comes from using
> Languages like Ruby and my special dislike of "typing things" comes
> especially from Java, C++ (well C is not "innocent" in that regard
> also. 
>
>   
OK, its a matter of personal preference (although it really does help 
anyone else reading your code).  However I find that if I leave out the 
top level definitions then type error messages at compile time are much 
harder to figure out, especially in a big program.  So I find that the 
extra typing pays in the long run.  :-/

Paul.