Iain Barnett wrote:
On 9 Oct 2008, at 9:33 pm, Andrew Coppin wrote:
I think it's just the teaching of the language that needs work, not
so much the language itself.
As a newer user myself, I'd agree with this statement. I'd like to see
far more mundane tasks solved in tutorials.
I would agree as well. My own flailings led to Software Tools in
Haskell[1], which taught me more about how to actually do things[2] than
the textbooks that I have read.
Haskell is can obviously do some really interesting things, but
constantly having wikipedia open so I can look up whatever mathematical
doodah has just been mentioned can get draining. Even Real World Haskell
suffers a bit from this.
The mathematical doodahs are *very* useful, much more so than any other
language I have used, but it helps to have some kind of foundation to
understand how and why. I am frequently reminded of a "How to Draw"
page from the Tick[3] comic, which went something like:
Step 1: Draw a large oval.
Step 2: Draw the Tick holding the oval.
On 10 Oct 2008, at 7:05 pm, Jonathan Cast wrote:
> Parsec makes recursive descent parsers as easy to use in Haskell as
> regexps are in Perl. No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to
> the thing it does best.
Is it wrong to use Parsec to parse regular expressions for a really
simple regex engine[4]?
[1] http://www.crsr.net/Programming_Languages/SoftwareTools/index.html
[2] Even if it is the wrong way. :-)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tick
[4] http://www.crsr.net/Programming_Languages/SoftwareTools/ch6.html
The engine itself is in Ch. 5.
--
Tommy M. McGuire
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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