[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hiding side effects in a data structure

Yes, htmls are better than pdfs (more lightweight, easier to work with if exact page layout is not important). I just wanted to point out that it is possible to link into some particular place of a pdf document. So the linking availability should not be the argument by itself. I would prefer html too but if pdf is required otherwise, it would be nice if link suppliers would provide more precise links. To spread the information that they can do so is the main reason I responded. Peter. Jon Fairbairn wrote:

Peter Hercek writes:

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Jon Fairbairn wrote:

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A hyperlink of the form <a href="http://.../long-research-paper.html#interesting-paragraph"> interesting bit</a> is far more useful than one of the form <a href="http://.../long-research-paper.pdf">look for section 49.7.3</a>. It may not seem significant, but when one is attempting to learn some new part of Haskell it's really off-putting. Pdfs are not that bad.

No, they (or at least links to them) typically are that bad! Mind you, as far as fragment identification is concerned, so are a lot of html pages. But even if the links do have fragment ids, pdfs still impose a significant overhead: I don't want stuff swapped out just so that I can run a pdf viewer; a web browser uses up enough resources as it is. And will Hoogle link into pdfs?

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The above definitely works OK on windows, not sure about linux pdf viewers.

Works perfectly on my Fedora 7 systems.

While this would be a definite improvement over having to search through the pdf, the delay and the fact that pdfs aren't as good as html for on-line viewing are still enough of an overhead that it's discouraging. If I'm using PHP (an execrable language), I can type the name (or something like the name) of any function into the search box on the PHP manual webpage and get useful (albeit often extremely irritating from a Haskell programmer's point of view) results straight back. Even including my language designer's distaste for PHP, this can make writing a wee bit of PHP a less onerous event than writing the same thing in Haskell -- definitely not what we want!