Hi all, The recent responses to my first question (thanks guys!) included the following bit: main = print (fact 42) Now, print is a side-effect. Shouldn't it involve a do-block or a nomad or one of those scary things you hear about when learning about side effects in functional programs? How come 'print' is allowed to exist alone if it's a side-effect? Thanks for the help. Cheers, Daniel. -- /\/`) http://oooauthors.org /\/_/ http://opendocumentfellowship.org /\/_/ \/_/ I am not over-weight, I am under-tall. /
sön 2005-12-18 klockan 20:22 +0000 skrev Daniel Carrera:
Hi all,
The recent responses to my first question (thanks guys!) included the following bit:
main = print (fact 42)
Now, print is a side-effect. Shouldn't it involve a do-block or a nomad or one of those scary things you hear about when learning about side effects in functional programs? How come 'print' is allowed to exist alone if it's a side-effect?
Thanks for the help.
Cheers, Daniel.
Daniel, first of all I would like to invite you to #haskell on irc.freenode.net. There are almost always people there to answer quick questions like this one, with less of the waiting period that's involved in a mailing list. You are of course also welcome to continue asking your questions here if you prefer. To answer your question: Yes, your main function does in fact involve the IO monad. You can easily check the type of main or any function you write by typing for example ":t main" in GHCi or Hugs. If you do this, you will see that main has the type signature "main :: IO ()". The reason you don't need do-blocks for this particular function is because it only involves one computation. If you have more than one, you need do-notation (well, there's a more correct and longer explanation for all this, but we can save that one for later). Oh, and don't mistake monads for scary things, they are really quite warm and fuzzy once you get to know them. :) Regards, Anders
Daniel Carrera wrote:
Hi all,
The recent responses to my first question (thanks guys!) included the following bit:
main = print (fact 42)
You can use a "do" block: main = do print (fact 42) which also works. But for a single thing of type (IO _) the "do" is optional.
Now, print is a side-effect. Shouldn't it involve a do-block or a nomad or one of those scary things you hear about when learning about side effects in functional programs? How come 'print' is allowed to exist alone if it's a side-effect?
Thanks for the help.
Cheers, Daniel.
By nomad you seemed to either be ridiculing or misspelling monad. The right-hand-side of main must have type "IO _" where _ is whatever type you program returns, often "()". The print command has type "print :: forall a. (Show a) => a -> IO ()" so the type of "print (fac 42)" is the desired type "IO ()". Thus there is no need for special "do" syntax or monad operators >> or >>=. Lets say you want to print several values: main = do putStr "(fact 42) is " print (fact 42) putStr "(fact 1) is " print (fact 1) That is the do-syntax with the whitespace sensitive 2D layout syntax. This is equivalent to main = do { putStr "(fac 42) is "; print (fact 42); putStr "(fac 1) is "; print (fact 1); } Now do-syntax is just sugar for (slighty simplified here): main = putStr "(fac 42) is " >> print (fact 42) >> putStr "(fac 1) is "">> print (fact 1) Where >> is an infix, binary operator that takes commands and returns the concatenated command. So the above is a single action that is the concatenation of the four IO commands. Since it is now a single command, no "do" is needed. The value of the whitespace form is that some people are happier reading and writing it. The value of the {;} syntax is that it is very familiar and perhaps more pleasing to some people and perhaps more pleasing to some code generaion tools. The value of the de-sugared form is that it *is* the Monadic form (which acutally uses >>= and case statements, details in the language definition http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/haskell98-report-htm... ) Sometime the Monadic form can be used to remove unhelpful variable bindings that clutter code. This can lead to clearer code. Note that the whitespace layout form has much less punctuation, and only a single two letter keyword. Unlike python the decision about how much to indent is up to the author, but the command must be lined up. -- Chris
Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
By nomad you seemed to either be ridiculing or misspelling monad.
Misspelling. It's a new word for me. I'm not really sure what it means. I expect it'll take me a while to figure it out. Thank you for the help. Best, Daniel. -- /\/`) http://oooauthors.org /\/_/ http://opendocumentfellowship.org /\/_/ \/_/ I am not over-weight, I am under-tall. /
On 12/18/05, Daniel Carrera
Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
By nomad you seemed to either be ridiculing or misspelling monad.
Misspelling. It's a new word for me. I'm not really sure what it means. I expect it'll take me a while to figure it out.
It sounds scary, I know! For now I'd recommend you to just think of it as "A computation, which may have side-effects, returning a value". And consider the do-notation as a way to "merge multiple computations together into a single one". For instance, "print" is a computation taking a showable value, returning () with the side effect that a string representation of the value is printed to stdout. Writing an IO program is then easily conceptualised as just "merging" together several existing IO computations into a single one. The compiler will take care of generating code for actually *running* the IO computation, your job is to define it. Monads have more uses than this, and there's a bit of interesting things to think about when learning about them, but you should probably hold off on that for now. /S -- Sebastian Sylvan +46(0)736-818655 UIN: 44640862
participants (4)
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Anders Höckersten -
Chris Kuklewicz -
Daniel Carrera -
Sebastian Sylvan