Hi,
So how, prey tell, do you factor out an expression which includes <p>...</p>? It is not Haskell, Haskell has no power there. Surely learning that mapping is easier than building your own (which will doubtlessly be worse (no offense, that's the first law of library use)).
And since you are a Haskell beginner, learning a library will teach you not only the library, but loads about common idioms and Haskell programming in general. As an example, it was only after using the Parsec library that I finally came to terms with monads; for whatever reason, I was incapable of grokking them studying only the standard built-ins.
I dunno, it just seems odd to me to avoid "extra learning" when you're trying to learn the language in the first place.
Luke
this is very debatable. Yesterday i read "there should be no libraries at all" from anyone here. And i know from Python, that libraries can be bad - i rewrote ftplib for my own use. I differentiate always between the language core and its libraries. Pythons unicode is catastrophic - but the core language is very, very fine. If there were a better STDLIB (and not many of them and Boost on top) and no autoconf, i would stick to C++. Still the fastest language and very powerful with types, respective classes. And i will embed Haskell into websides - thats the next step after having ported the server. The least, what can be done here, and can be done easily, is a kind of preprocessor. Perhaps i'll call it phaskelp (? - or phasp ?). Happy New Year, Joost