On 20/09/2007, Ryan Ingram
I think a more consistent behavior would be to not print the LHS at all. If you wanted to print the result of the computation you could just do:
Prelude> bar 5
or, if you also wanted bound variables afterwards:
Prelude> (x, Just y) <- bar 5 Prelude> (x, Just y)
Perhaps this is my imperative background speaking, but I don't see much difference at the GHCi prompt between these two:
Prelude> let x = 5 Prelude> x <- return 5
I agree with this interpretation. If I want to just *do* the action, I'll type it. If I want to *store* the action then I'll bind it to something. That's the intuition I have, anyway. And it works for pure functions: Prelude> let ns = [1..] Prelude> [1..] The difference between those two feels like the difference between: Prelude> contents <- readFile "massive.txt" Prelude> readFile "massive.txt" But as Ryan mentioned, this may just be poor intuition from an overly imperative mindset... Cheers, D.