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Doubts about functional programming paradigm
by Abhishek Kumar 29 Dec '15

29 Dec '15

I am a beginner in haskell.I have heard a lot about haskell being great for parallel programming and concurrency but couldn't understand why?Aren't iterative algorithms like MapReduce more suitable to run parallely?Also how immutable data structures add to speed?I'm having trouble understanding very philosophy of functional programming, how do we gain by writing everything as functions and pure code(without side effects)? Any links or references will be a great help. Thanks Abhishek Kumar

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How to show a predicate
by martin 29 Dec '15

29 Dec '15

Hello all, in my program, I do stuff with predicates (a->Bool). For the most part this representation is just fine, but at the very end I need to convert a resulting predicate into a String so I can write it to a file. Wenn I represent my predicates as Lists or Sets, then this is doable and I am tempted to do it this way. The only other option I could come up with was to have a representation of "everything", which would in my case be large (10^8) but finite. Then I could construct a List or a Set at the very end, as [x | x<-everything, p x] without having explicit sets in the intermediate steps. I cannot see any other option, but I thought I better ask.

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find an element in a list
by Fabien R 26 Dec '15

26 Dec '15

As a newbie, I'm studying the pdf 'the Haskell road to logic, math and programming' and I'm stuck with one exercise. I want to extract x if x is at the beginning of a list. I thought to use something like this: extractIfBegins x [xs] | [xs] == (x:ys) = [ys] | otherwise = [xs] But ghci complains that ys is not defined. Without giving the answer, can someone give a hint about the approach to follow ? -- Fabien

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warning in making instances of Functor class!
by Abhijit Patel 26 Dec '15

26 Dec '15

why am i getting warning in the following code?? though it works perfectly!!! Prelude> newtype Pair1 c b a=Pair1 {getPair1 :: (a,b,c)} Prelude> :{ Prelude| instance Functor (Pair1 m n) where Prelude| fmap f (Pair1 (x,y,z))=Pair1 (f x,y,z) Prelude| :} <interactive>:55:10: Warning: No explicit implementation for ‘Prelude.fmap’ In the instance declaration for ‘Functor (Pair1 m n)’ -- The below shows it is working fine! Prelude> getPair1 $ fmap (*100) (Pair1 (2,3,1)) (200,3,1)

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FW: Initial startup of GHCi (Windows) v. 7.10.3
by pmcilroy＠gmail.com 26 Dec '15

26 Dec '15

Running on windows 10, GHC interactive fails to load any standard packages. The startup message does not include the prompt about initializing packages do, as shown commonly on Haskell getting started tutorials. Instead I see: GHCi, version 7.10.3: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Prelude> :l Data.Text <no location info>: module ‘Data.Text’ is a package module Failed, modules loaded: none. Prelude> Any pointers on what to do next?

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Re: [Haskell-beginners] Doubts about functional programming paradigm
by Doug McIlroy 23 Dec '15

23 Dec '15

Though this post was prompted by beginners(a)haskell.org, it seemed pertinent enough for cross-posting to haskell-prime. > I just wanted to make a point that learning haskell is *much* > harder than learning most other programming languages I would not put it that way. One gets so much farther in capability almost instantly with a functional language. I know. At the dawn of functional programming, John McCarthy could teach in one hour everything from cons up to symbol manipulation that would have been a month's project in Fortran. (My account of that hour is at http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html.) What's hard about Haskell is that its landscape extends into terrains not imagined elsewhere. As long as you stay in the flat Floridian landscape of Fortran et al, you don't need to explore the Himalayas of Haskell. But of course the very exhilaration and inspiration of the high peaks draws one into the "*much* harder" training necessary to surmount them. > the learning aids that are available are not yet cohesive > enough to present a clear path ahead for the average programmer. I agree with this. Alas, there does not exist a definition of the Haskell one reads about on the haskell-cafe mailing list. I treasure my hardcover Haskell 98 report--so rare you can't even find it in the used-book marketplace. Haskell 2010 was obsolete as soon as it was promulgated. Contemporary Haskell as practiced by cognoscenti flaps in a gale of language pragmas. There is no authoritative source about these pragmas. They are listed and described in the GHC User Guide, but that source all too often defines solely by example, not even bolstered by a formal syntax specification. I earnestly hope the newly revived Haskell-prime committee can rectify this state of affairs, and that GHC will provide a compliant implementation. Doug McIlroy

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Pattern matching is actually about matching constructors??
by Olumide 22 Dec '15

22 Dec '15

Hello, On chapter 7 of LYH there's an example of a user-defined operator .++ infixr 5 .++ (.++) :: List a -> List a -> List a Empty .++ ys = ys (x :-: xs) .++ ys = x :-: (xs .++ ys) which is used as follows let a = 3 :-: 4 :-: 5 :-: Empty let b = 6 :-: 7 :-: Empty a .++ b (:-:) 3 ((:-:) 4 ((:-:) 5 ((:-:) 6 ((:-:) 7 Empty)))) Following this the text reads: "Notice how we pattern matched on (x :-: xs). That works because pattern matching is actually about matching constructors. We can match on :-: because it is a constructor for our own list type ..." Source: http://learnyouahaskell.com/making-our-own-types-and-typeclasses#recursive-… Is the operator :-: a constructor? I'm confused because the definition of :-: is not prefixed by the data keyword? - Olumide

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Mixing pattern matching and guards
by martin 22 Dec '15

22 Dec '15

Hello all, I recently wrote this piece of code import qualified Data.Set as S [...] purge :: (Eq cp, Eq ip) => Product cp ip -> Product cp ip purge (Punion ps) | ps' == S.empty = Pempty where ps' = S.filter (/= Pempty) ps purge x = x and I thought I had missed the "otherwise" case in the guard and I was prepared to see a "non exhaustive ..." error, but to my amazement it works *Main> purge $ Punion $ S.fromList [Packed 1 Pempty] Punion (fromList [Packed 1 Pempty]) As this is a Punion, it should match the first pattern, but not the guard. It seems to fall right through to the second pattern. Is this the way it works?

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Re: [Haskell-beginners] How to nest arbitrary things
by Imants Cekusins 22 Dec '15

22 Dec '15

> how to write an "unpack" function is this what Lenses are all about? https://www.fpcomplete.com/school/to-infinity-and-beyond/pick-of-the-week/a… tutorial I stumbled across Lenses only recently so can not write a working example yet. if Lenses are relevant to this topic, could someone kindly post an appropriate (Truck Parcel Can) datatype and an "unpack" with Lenses example?

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How to nest arbitrary things
by martin 22 Dec '15

22 Dec '15

Hello all, I was trying to model things which can contain other things. This is easy as long as containers and the contained items all can be described in the same fashion. However when I want to model - say - trucks containing boxes containing parcels containing cans and trucks, boxes, parcels and cans are not of the same type, then this nested thing will become a type in its own right and it will be of a different type than trucks containing cans (which are not wrappen in parcels ...) As long as I can squeeze trucks, boxes ... into one type, possibly by using a "container_type" attribute, there is no problem. Is this the only way to do this? Is there an idiom?

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