On 07/01/2013 12:14 PM, Marc Gorenstein wrote:
What sort of beast is ( / 8) in Haskell? It looks like it is a function that divides a number by 8.
Yep. This is probably easier to think about with addition rather than division. So, (+) is a function. It takes two arguments, and adds them. You need the parenthesis to prevent it from being an infix operator (used in *between* the numbers), but that's just a detail. Try it in ghci: ghci> (+) 1 2 3 Thanks to currying, you can construct a function called "plus_one" by leaving off the last argument: ghci> let plus_one = (+) 1 ghci> let plus_one = (+ 1) Either notation will work, but they do subtly different things: in the first case, you get 1 + x, and in the second, you get x + 1. Nevertheless. ghci> plus_one 2 3 Division works the same way.