On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 21:34 -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 06:39:58PM -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote: > > On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 18:13 -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > > > On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 02:29:54PM -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote: > > > > > I've > > > > > got a Haskell book here (Hutton, 170 pages) that doesn't even mention > > > > > > > > > > how to open a file! > > > > > > > > That short, and you expect minor features like that (that not every > > > > program even needs) to be squeezed in? > > > > > > Uh... yes. Opening and closing files, command-line parsing, etc -- > > > needed by almost every program. Aside from some very simple > > > stdin-to-stdout filters, it is difficult to imagine a program where > > > you don't need to open a file! > > > > Again, you need a bigger imagination. My day job is almost entirely > > DB-centric; code that uses file I/O is very much a special case. > > Not saying that it doesn't exist (though of course most databases > still use file I/O at some level, even if abstracted). Just that it's > very, very common. I wouldn't support at all teaching database > interactions or network programming before file I/O.
I'm not advocating that. But I do think demanding the teaching of *any* interface issues before you've shown enough Haskell to write interesting logic to tie to the interface is backwards. jcc _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
