On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 01:04:03PM +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
Seriously, though, what is the RWH authors' plan for tackling the eternal frustration of Haskell book authors, a moving target?
There used to be a time when one could guess the poster's Haskell book from their question topics:
- 'HGL' doesn't work: Hudak's book - 'fromInt' issues: Thompson's book
The problem arises because the books survive far longer than the version of the code base they refer to. The only way to reduce this friction has been to avoid fast-changing details, eg, focussing on programming, problem solving, reasoning (Hutton, Thompson, Bird), and even that isn't safe ('n+k', 'fromInt',..).
One of the specific aims of Haskell 98 was to provide a stable base for authors. It did not include fromInt, which was an internal quirk of the Hugs implementation, and nor did any other Haskell implementation.