"What's a call stack?"

(I don't know what Chris' target audience is though)

On Sat, 13 Feb 2016 5:18 pm Eric Seidel <eric@seidel.io> wrote:

Here's what the GHCi session should look like.

> $ ghci
> GHCi, version 8.0.0.20160204: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
> Loaded GHCi configuration from /home/callen/.ghci
> Prelude> let myList = [1..5 :: Integer]
> Prelude> let myList' = myList ++ undefined
> Prelude> :t myList'
> myList' :: HasCallStack => [Integer]

If your readers are using :t they must already know about simple types
like Integer, [], and, ->, so the new things are HasCallStack and =>.
This is how I would explain them.

=> is just like -> except the compiler fills in the argument by
itself.
HasCallStack tells the compiler that the expression needs a call-stack
because it might crash. So HasCallStack => [Integer] is a [Integer]
that
might crash and produce a stack-trace.

I think the call-stacks are much less scary and confusing than
type-classes in general, which you kind of have to deal with as soon as
you talk about arithmetic.

Eric
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