Thanks for all the help. I think things are much clearer now. And this bit:
main = do putStrLn "Hello, what is your name?" name <- getLine putStrLn ("Hello, " ++ name ++ "!")
Looks quite straight forward. I just wrote my very first IO program with Haskell: --//-- main = do x <- getLine putStrLn( show(length x) ) --//-- That's not so scary. The next thing I need to figure out is how to act on the input data itself (not just its length). For example, if I wanted a program to output the nth element of the fibonacci sequence: --//-- $ ./fib 12 144 --//-- My first inclination would be to write it as: --//-- main = do x <- getLine putStrLn( show(fib x) ) --//-- Of course that won't work because x is an IO String and 'fib' wants an Int. To it looks like I need to do a conversion "IO a -> b" but from what Cale said, that's not possible because it would defeat the referential transparency of Haskell. Hmm... there must be a way to solve this problem though... In any event, thanks for the help. I'm learning :) Cheers, Daniel. -- /\/`) http://oooauthors.org /\/_/ http://opendocumentfellowship.org /\/_/ \/_/ I am not over-weight, I am under-tall. /