Re: [Haskell-beginners] can this be made shorter?

afaik in scala you can say:

null . dropWhile (_ == '.' || _ == '/')

which is a bit more compact than the haskell...

No, it would be desugared to: dropWhile ((a,b) => a == '.' || b == '/') scala> "abc".dropWhile(_ == '.' || _ == '/') <console>:8: error: wrong number of parameters; expected = 1 "abc".dropWhile(_ == '.' || _ == '/') You would have to do the same thing as in Haskell to make it work: scala> "abc".dropWhile(a => a == '.' || a == '/') res20: String = abc Cheers Sylvain