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. In this case, since the function is a class method, it is crucial to document the intended contract which users of the class method can assume and which implementors of the class method must satisfy. But this has not been done. The Control.Monad.Fix module also defines a function "fix", and here things seem a little better, since there is a function "fix" mentioned in the paper (NOT in the paper's section on monads, but instead in a section titled "computing with lattices"). However, the fix function in the paper has a different type than the fix function in Control.Monad.Fix, and because of this the two cannot possibly have the same semantics. In the case of "fix", you can at least look at the ghc library source code. But that doesn't work for class methods like "mfix". -- Fergus J. Henderson | "I have always known that the pursuit Galois Connections, Inc. | of excellence is a lethal habit" Phone: +1 503 626 6616 | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 10:48:00AM -0700, Fergus Henderson wrote:

Sometimes descriptions are left out even when it is not obvious. For example, the documentation for Control.Monad.Fix [...]

Yes, that will never do. Please report anything else like this to the Maintainer email address for the module concerned.