[Haskell-cafe] hspec - type issue in error assertion

[Paweł Bałaga]

Hello fellow Haskellers!

I'm approaching learning the basics of Haskell by going through
https://wiki.haskell.org/99_questions. At the same time I write tests for
my code in Hspec. Consider question no. 2: "Find the last but one element
of a list".

My solution:
-- Problem 02
myButLast :: [a] -> a
myButLast [] = error "Empty list"
myButLast [x] = error "List has only one element"
myButLast [x1,x2] = x1
myButLast (x:xs) = myButLast xs

and a  a test:
describe "02 myButLast" $ do
it "returns the last but one element of a list" $ do
myButLast [] `shouldThrow` anyErrorCall
myButLast [1] `shouldThrow` anyErrorCall -- <- this line causes the problem
myButLast [1..4] `shouldBe` 3
myButLast ['x','y','z'] `shouldBe` 'y'
myButLast "abc" `shouldBe` 'b'


Building tests with stack test command causes the below compilation error:

    • No instance for (Num (IO a0)) arising from the literal ‘1’
>     • In the expression: 1
>       In the first argument of ‘myButLast’, namely ‘[1]’
>       In the first argument of ‘shouldThrow’, namely ‘myButLast [1]’
>    |
> 27 |             myButLast [1] `shouldThrow` anyErrorCall
>    |
>


>From what I understand, type of myButLast [1] is different than expected by
shouldThrow. What I don't understand is why exactly it behaves so and how
to fix this problem. Only that one assertion doesn't compile. The others
are fine. Particularly, why does myButLast [] `shouldThrow` anyErrorCall
work but with one element it doesn't?

Can you please give me a hand?
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