Hello, I took a bit of a break from the book over this week in order to give time to my ideas to get clearer. By the way, I just reduced my Haskell naivety a bit by writing an useful-ish standalone "real world" program, which works fine other than for being very memory hungry (still, the code is *so* much nicer to work with than the corresponding procedural implementations that I would gladly concede it a couple hundred megabytes to play with). Anyway... On 05/17/2010 11:41 AM, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
An example is worth more than a hundred words. ;) I think they make excellent one-line explanations. In fact, I'm unsure whether it's a good idea to write more detailed explanations at all, I'd rather link to the official documentation for that.
I agree to your feelings about detailed explanations; writing them would likely be a boring and potentially pointless task. Replacing the wikilinks in the table with auto-generated links to the docs can probably be done in a reasonably painless way with an extra template.
Also, I'm unhappy with the current markup we have to use. It's much easier to specify it in "pseudo haddock markup"
-- | Last element. --> last [1,2,3] = 3 last :: [a] -> a
-- | Number of elements. --> length [True, False] = 2 length :: [a] -> Int
and have a Haskell program translate that to wikitext or any other format.
That would be an interesting possibility for generating the tables... too bad we can't shortcut around the MediaWiki interface, and would likely still have to rely on it (and its hideous triple-curly-bracket syntax) for maintenance of the cheat sheets after they are uploaded. By the way, that reminds me I used to have a neat Firefox add-on which allowed to edit the contents of any text area into vim; it could become handy in such circumstances. By the way, a note about the chapters: I am missing a bit of doing some actual writing, so if I feel brave enough I will try to contribute to some of the missing bits of Basics. The most likely targets for me would be the initial explanation of numerical types in "Type basics" or some of the list comprehension introduction that will become "Working with lists". Regards, Daniel Mlot