[Haskell-cafe] Function to cast types

[Rafael Cunha de Almeida]

John Dorsey wrote:
> Anonymous One,
> 
>> I'm new to haskell, I'm wondering how can you write a function that will do
>> the following:
>> fromIntToString :: Int -> String
> 
> Is this a homework assignment, perchance?  Please take a look at
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Homework_help
> Everyone here is glad to help, but we're also sensitive on academic
> honesty.
> 

This e-mail is offtopic, but I suppose being a little offtopic every now
and then isn't that bad, specially if the subject is interesting. So,
here I go.

The only reason people would want the answer of an assignment instead of
actually doing it themselves is if they don't care about actually doing
it. That is, they don't want to learn haskell, they just want to pass a
class. In that case, do we really want to _make_ them learn?

You could argue that helping someone pass some class without learning is
not worth your time. I wouldn't try to convince you otherwise. But if
you thought the assignment was interesting and you did it yourself, I
see no problem with sharing that with the person who asked it. The
bottom line is that I don't believe in making people learn things they
are not interested in learning in the first place.