Haskell-ites, Thanks to everyone who helped me out with the numeric-input query. The main purpose of the query was to point up what I think is a serious weakness of Haskell: the Prelude is still too complicated. Any time I have to go near the numeric class hierarchy, or the read package, I have the heebie-jeebies, and I am by no means a casual Haskell programmer. As a Haskell user, I would ask that the simplification of the prelude be seriously considered in any future revisions of the language. Consider the following points. 1) My colleagues were surprised that Haskell did not parse floating-point numbers properly; in fact, Haskell 1.3 does but not Haskell 1.2. However, GHC and Hugs retain the Haskell 1.2 behaviour. Would this have happened if Haskell provided a small and simple collection of input routines? 2) Where is the correct behaviour of `read', `reads', etc., documented? If it isn't documented, is this because it would take up too much room? 3) I considered writing a simple `atof' function from first principles but quickly abandoned the idea, it being too much work to extricate myself from the class-hierarchy tar pit to achieve simple conversions between integral and floating-point types. So how about turfing the read package and the numeric class hierarchy into the standard libraries, replacing them with a small core of classes, types and functions that could be properly documented. The read package could be converted into a complete Haskell parsing utility in the process. Chris Dornan [EMAIL PROTECTED] University College Cork +353 21 902837
