On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 10:32:00PM +0000, John Moore wrote:

Hi Felipe, this is way complicated for my level, could you look at this below and see if I could use this instead.

I understand you, it also took me some time to understand the monad transformer library :).

evalStep :: Expression -> Expression evalStep (Val x)= (Val x) evalStep (Add x y) = case x of (Val a) -> case y of (Val b) -> Val (a+b) left -> Add x (evalStep y) right -> Add (evalStep x)y

Even without the Writer monad you capture that pattern in an auxiliary function. You just extract the common bits and abstract the specific ones: aux calcOp mkOp x y = case x of (Val a) -> case y of (Val b) -> Val (a `calcOp` b) left -> mkOp x (evalStep y) right -> mkOp (evalStep x) y Note that: - I've changed (+) into calcOp and Add into mkOp. - Instead of deconstructing with a pattern match, I receive x and y as proper arguments. The type is type CalcOp = Integer -> Integer -> Integer type MkOp = Expression -> Expression -> Expression aux :: CalcOp -> MkOp -> Expression -> Expression -> (Expression -> Expression) You can write your evalStep as evalStep :: Expression -> Expression evalStep (Val x) = Val x evalStep (Add x y) = aux (+) Add x y evalStep (Subtract x y) = aux (-) Subtract x y evalStep (Multiply x y) = aux (*) Multiply x y evalStep (Divide x y) = aux div Divide x y Much cleaner ;).

What I mean to do is build up a history on a list and then take it of a list( Same principle as a stack but a little more simple) the problem is how do I get the other elements back of the list as in the line "r" -> evaluate (I'm not sure what I put here) Hopes this makes some sort of sense.

It does makes sense. In most languages this is the sort of code you would write: when the user tell us to evaluate, we evaluate and then save the result. However in our language we can leverage the laziness: buildHistory :: Expression -> [Expression] buildHistory expr = expr : buildHistory (evalStep) You may recognize this function as buildHistory = iterate evalStep (Note that unless your expression is infinite, then this list will contain an infinite number of duplicates when we reach the fixed point of the evalStep function.) The idea is to take everything you can out of IO. With buildHistory we take the logic of evaluating the expressions further out of IO. Now your function is as trivial as mine. In fact, it is the same. HTH, -- Felipe.