Manlio Perillo
The main problem, here, is that: - recursion and pattern matching are explained in every tutorial about functional programming and Haskell.
This is the reason why I find them more "natural".
Well, you're going to have a hard time writing a BASIC tutorial without mentioning GOTO. While surely it has to be there, for the sake of completeness of fundamentals, I completely agree that...
- high level, Haskell specific, abstractions, are *not* explained in normal tutorials or books. The libraries where these concepts are implemented, are not well documented. Most of the "documentation" is in research papers, and a "normal" programmer don't want to read these papers.
Only in the recent "Real World Haskell", all these high level abstraction have been properly documented
...GOTO alone doesn't teach you how to write a loop, trust me, I was stuck there for a good while, eons ago. The prelude, as well as commonly used functions that should be in there, utterly lack accompanying documentation. There should be no function without a usage, as in foldl/sum/product, and no usage without explanation why foldl is chosen over foldl' and foldr. Think of a Preludopedia, accompanying the Typeclassopedia: Documentation where you don't have to snatch understanding out of assem^H^H^H^H^H^H code written using primitive recursion, to make it a bit easier to see the wood despite of all those trees. PS: Shouldn't zipWith be defined in terms of zip, uncurry and map instead of zipWith f (a:as) (b:bs) = f a b : zipWith f as bs zipWith _ _ _ = [] ? -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.