Re: [Haskell-beginners] How to check the help page of a function?

Kind of surprised at the attitude shown in this thread. It's entirely reasonable to expect a REPL to offer help functionality (especially coming from Python/R), even if , digging deeper, it turns out to be difficult to offer. Mainly because docs aren't auto-included with packages. ghci isn't meant to be a full-blown dev environment, but hey the python console isn't meant to either. I think a tangential issue is that there's no "blessed" solution, so we're worried about lock-in. https://wiki.haskell.org/GHC/GHCi <-- this page describes how to set up your environment to get output from hoogle into ghci (by doing :hoogle map for example). On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 2:28 AM Kim-Ee Yeoh wrote:

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 6:18 AM, Peng Yu wrote:

...

Many other languages have help pages in the command (see help() in python and R). Why haskell doesn't have such a feature?

You could flip the question around and ask, why do Python and R insist on incorporating emacs functionality in their REPLs instead of keeping things orthogonal. Otherwise, there's a lot of repetition.

As Brandon explained, ghci isn't meant to be the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink development environment.

It used to be that someone starting Haskell would have learned Unix and its ethos beforehand. That's not a ding against you, btw, just an observation that ghci was designed in an earlier era. Patches to ghci are most welcome!

-- Kim-Ee _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beginners