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 <ky3@atamo.com> wrote:

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 6:18 AM, Peng Yu <pengyu.ut@gmail.com> 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

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