On Fri, 24 Jul 2009, Duke Normandin wrote:
Hello....
I'm 2 days into Haskell. NOT new to Perl, PHP, M(umps), TCL, newLISP. I'm using "YAHT.pdf" as an intro to Haskell. Here's a quote:
[quote] ... if you have a value x, you must not think of x as a register, a memory location or anything else of that nature. x is simply a name, just as Hal is my name. You cannot arbitrarily decide to store a different person in my name any more than you can arbitrarily decide to store a different value in x. This means that code that might look like the following C code is invalid (and has no counterpart) in Haskell:
int x = 5; [/quote]
So is fair to say that an expression in Haskell like:
x = 5
is more like a constant in imperative languages - say Perl? E.g.
use constant SECONDS_PER_DAY => 86400; -- duke
Thanks to all the responders!! --Thomas F.
You will get the idea in a couple of days. I am sure.
Maybe next week! I'm going fly-fishing for trout on the weekend, as is my usual practice here in the Alberta (Canada) foothills ;) -- Kyle M. & Thomas D. What I gather from your replies is that the only "true" variables in Haskell are the args passed to a function. Is that correct? ...and further, that what sometimes appears to be a variable to an "unwashed" imperative programmer", is really a function with no arguments, returning a "constant" value. How did I do? -- duke