[Haskell-cafe] Can I use String without "" in ghci?

[Rustom Mody]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe  wrote:

>
> A slogan I have programmed by since I first met C and recognised
> how vastly superior to PL/I it was for text manipulation _because_
> it didn't have a proper string type is "Strings are Wrong!".
>

I wonder if you notice the irony in your use of 'C' as exemplar in this
context?

C rode to fame on the back of Unix. And Unix's innovation - one of many -
is that at the OS level the string type was made common fare - a universal
type.  So everything from file names to file contents to IPC is a string.

Of course when instructing a beginning programmer your basic premise
'Strings are Wrong!' is most likely right.  However if programs are seen as
entities interacting with an 'external' world, the currency at the portals
is invariably string.  And more than just noob programmers have got this
wrong - think of the precious one-byte opcodes that Intel wastes on ascii
and decimal arithmetic. So while this is true:

If bar is predefined, it *isn't* the string 'b':'a':'r':[].
> If bar is a number, it *isn't* a string.
> So "other strings" is quite misleading.
>

 in the innards of haskell, bar is a string


On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 9:51 PM, Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:

> When 3 and 1/2 are typed next to each other, i.e.,
>
>   3 1/2
>
> it is addition.



Well mathematicians are always eliding!

In 3 1/2 the elision amounts to +
In xy it amounts to *
And within 23 ie between the 2 and the 3, it amounts to λ x y -> 10*x + y

And Haskell elides function application

When teaching gofer (in the early 90s) I found that undoing the elision of
function application and making it explicit, made FP more withing reach of
the kids.

Idea inspired by Dijkstra http://www.the-magus.in/Publications/ewd.pdf
And more recently summarized
http://blog.languager.org/2013/08/applying-si-on-sicp.html


Rusi
-- 
http://www.the-magus.in
http://blog.languager.org
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