On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 21:34 -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 06:39:58PM -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 18:13 -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 02:29:54PM -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote:
I've got a Haskell book here (Hutton, 170 pages) that doesn't even mention how to open a file!
That short, and you expect minor features like that (that not every program even needs) to be squeezed in?
Uh... yes. Opening and closing files, command-line parsing, etc -- needed by almost every program. Aside from some very simple stdin-to-stdout filters, it is difficult to imagine a program where you don't need to open a file!
Again, you need a bigger imagination. My day job is almost entirely DB-centric; code that uses file I/O is very much a special case.
Not saying that it doesn't exist (though of course most databases still use file I/O at some level, even if abstracted). Just that it's very, very common. I wouldn't support at all teaching database interactions or network programming before file I/O.
I'm not advocating that. But I do think demanding the teaching of *any* interface issues before you've shown enough Haskell to write interesting logic to tie to the interface is backwards. jcc