Hi, this one is a bit of a mystery to me. I am working on solutions to cis194/NICTA Haskell exercises and among others I am asked to work with (->). I understand it refers to the reader/environment design patterns, but I am stumped as for what exactly it is. It doesn't seem to be an ordinary type, I know it is used as type constructor in type declarations, so that suggests it's a function, but somehow special. Looking in Hoogle it seems to be Haskell keyword - e.g. not an ordinary function. So what is it - type constructor, a keyword, how is it related to the reader/environment pattern?
From GHCI's :info (->) I get: data (->) a b -- Defined in ‘ghc-prim-0.4.0.0:GHC.Prim’ instance P.Monad ((->) r) -- Defined in ‘GHC.Base’ instance P.Functor ((->) r) -- Defined in ‘GHC.Base’ instance P.Applicative ((->) a) -- Defined in ‘GHC.Base’ instance P.Monoid b => P.Monoid (a -> b) -- Defined in ‘GHC.Base’
Cheers Martin