[Haskell-cafe] What does "1 = 2" mean in Haskell?

Jeff Clites jclites at mac.com
Fri Feb 24 05:18:21 UTC 2017


This works too:

    Nothing = Just "hello"

so you get the same effect even without any literal number specialness.

Even this:

    Just x = Nothing

also "works" until you force evaluation of x, as an irrefutable (lazy) pattern match. So in a way, you could view the first case as a lazy pattern match in which there is nothing you could possibly force, so there's no way to manifest the pattern match failure.

Just another way of looking at it.

JEff

> On Feb 23, 2017, at 7:00 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It is, yes. (Literal numbers in patterns occasionally have unexpected type ramifications as a result; and occasionally others, since the compiler rewrites the pattern match into a guard. It's one of those things that Just Works 99% of the time and then makes you tear your hair out.)
> 
>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 9:56 PM, Harendra Kumar <harendra.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My first guess was a pattern match, but it sounded a bit odd because there is no explicit constructor in case of numbers.  If there were an explicit constructor it would have been easier to imagine this as a pattern match. This seems to be a weird side effect of the special handling of numbers.
>> 
>> -harendra
>> 
>>> On 24 February 2017 at 07:37, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 9:05 PM, Harendra Kumar <harendra.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Kids have this amazing ability to break any toy in minutes. I gave my seven year old daughter ghci to play with and in a little while she said it is broken:
>>>> >> let 1 = 2
>>>> 
>>>> >> 1
>>>> 
>>>> 1
>>>> 
>>>> >> 
>>>> 
>>>> Earlier, I had explained to her about symbols and assigning values to symbols, and I said numbers are not symbols. But when she came up with this I could not explain what's going on. How can "1 = 2" be a valid equation? Am I missing something fundamental here, or it is just broken?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> It's a pattern match. The match fails, but as it produced no bindings it cannot be observed and its success or failure is irrelevant. 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
>>> allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
>>> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
> allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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