On Tuesday 05 July 2011, 19:55:43, Patrick LeBoutillier wrote:
Hi all,
Here's my question: Does ghci have a verbose mode or something where is can show you step by step how the types are worked out?
No. You can use it to get the types of subexpressions, though, and work towards the complete expression from that: Prelude> :t (:) (:) :: a -> [a] -> [a] Prelude> :t (. (:)) (. (:)) :: (([a] -> [a]) -> c) -> a -> c Prelude> :t (map . (:)) (map . (:)) :: a -> [[a]] -> [[a]] which gives you smaller gaps to fill in.
If not is there a hackage (or any other kind of) package that can do that?
I'm not aware of any, but there might be.
a lot, so I was wondering if such a program existed that could do it automatically.
Automatic type checkers do exist (every compiler/interpreter needs one), but I don't think they have been written with the ability to output not only the result but also the derivation. For someone familiar with a particular type checker, it probably wouldn't be hard to add that feature, but if it's a complicated beast like GHC's type checker, becoming familiar with it would probably be a big undertaking. Writing your own much-reduced (able to parse and typecheck only a very restricted subset of the language) might be easier, but probably working from Mark P. Jones' "Typing Haskell in Haskell" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/ would be better than starting from scratch (it's somewhat oldish, so it certainly doesn't cope with recent GHC extensions, but for everyday run-of- the-mill problems, it should be working with only minor modifications).