Hi!

I'm very much a beginning programmer, studying Haskell. I have two questions -

Great! Beginners are very welcome!

Firstly, I am trying to generate random numbers in Haskell, but although I have found a 'random' library on www.zvon.org, I don't really know how to include library functions, and the documentation given doesn't really tell me the effective difference between all the functions provided in the library. In another interesting development, I couldn't find any mention of this library in haskell.org's list of libraries.

You want to put 'import Random' at the top of your program. A bit of a warning, though: using random numbers isn't entirely straightforward in Haskell, due to the fact that it is a pure language (which means that you cannot have a function like 'randomInt :: () -> Int' which will return a random integer -- this is because any call to this function must always return the same result).

Secondly, but perhaps more importantly, is there a more 'beginnerish' list that I should be addressing this to? I've been following discussions on this one and they don't seem to be at quite this level.

This list is appropriate. -- Hal Daume III | hdaume@isi.edu "Arrest this man, he talks in maths." | www.isi.edu/~hdaume

Jacinta wrote:

Firstly, I am trying to generate random numbers in Haskell, but although I have found a 'random' library on www.zvon.org, I don't really know how to include library functions, and the documentation given doesn't really tell me the effective difference between all the functions provided in the library. In another interesting development, I couldn't find any mention of this library in haskell.org's list of libraries.

http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/random.html to include the library you'll need: import Random at the top of your module. Using the routines is a bit fiddly, so you might need to experiment for a while. Here's a start: dice = do { x <- getStdRandom (randomR (1::Int,6)) ; print x}

Secondly, but perhaps more importantly, is there a more 'beginnerish' list that I should be addressing this to? I've been following discussions on this one and they don't seem to be at quite this level.

I think the Haskell cafe is a fair place for such questions. I think you are from Melbourne Uni, if so we have a local newsgroup called cs.programming that you can also try. Some local Haskell people (like me) read it all the time. Cheers, Bernie.