Re: [Haskell-cafe] complete documentation like the one from Java or C++

hello, Fergus Henderson wrote:

On 10-Sep-2004, Cale Gibbard wrote:

...

Just in case it's not what you're referring to, http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/index.html together with the Haskell report http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/ generally does the trick for me.

Occasionally, descriptions are left out when the name of the thing together with the type signature generally tells you what it does. (e.g. things like "isEmptySet :: Set a -> Bool" are pretty obvious.)

Sometimes descriptions are left out even when it is not obvious. For example, the documentation for Control.Monad.Fix http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Control.Monad.Fix... merely says "The Fix monad. Inspired by [... reference to 40-page paper ...].", and it turns out that the module is only very loosely inspired by a few small parts of the cited paper. The module defines a class method "mfix" which is not documented and which does not appear to correspond with any class method in the cited paper.

this is a copy-and-paste mistake. mark jones' paper has nothing to do with mfix. i believe andy gill originally wrote the monad library and he probably got inspired by the cited paper. then when someone added the mfix module they simply copied the header. details about "mfix" can be found in levent erkok's thesis (there are also some smaller papers describing the ideas) http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~erkok/rmb/ hope this helps -iavor