I haven’t personally come across a desire to constrain the types within data types I’ve created, but it’s not obvious to me why the language designers “decided it was a bad idea to allow”. Why is that? Because it was misleading and worked completely backwards from what would actually be useful. In particular, it didn’t … Read more
This is called a nonlinear pattern. There have been several threads on the haskell-cafe mailing list about this, not long ago. Here are two: http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/msg59617.html http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/msg62491.html Bottom line: it’s not impossible to implement, but was decided against for sake of simplicity. By the way, you do not need if or case to work around this; … Read more
Partially applied type synonyms are not allowed in Haskell at all. A partially applied synonym is effectively a function whose inputs are the un-applied types and whose output is a type. For example, here is an encoding of boolean logic: type True x y = x type False x y = y type Not b … Read more
A jump table is used, making the pattern-match a constant time operation. Unfortunately I’m unable to find an up-to-date citation for this, although this page mentions the implementation of Cmm-level switch statements as jump tables, and this old tagging design document uses a case on a Bool as an example, producing a jump table.
Typically, you modify elements of a list by splitting the list, replacing an element, and joining it back together. To split a list at an index, we have: splitAt :: Int -> [a] -> ([a], [a]) which you can use to break up a list, like so: > splitAt 2 [“Off”,”Off”,”Off”,”Off”] ([“Off”,”Off”],[“Off”,”Off”]) now you just … Read more
GHCi has a :browse command to list the contents of modules: Prelude> :browse Data.List (\\) :: (Eq a) => [a] -> [a] -> [a] delete :: (Eq a) => a -> [a] -> [a] deleteBy :: (a -> a -> Bool) -> a -> [a] -> [a] deleteFirstsBy :: (a -> a -> Bool) -> … Read more
The Original Haskell Code There are two issues with the Haskell version: You’re using string IO, which builds linked lists of characters You’re using a non-quicksort that looks like quicksort. This program takes 18.7 seconds to run on my Intel Core2 2.5 GHz laptop. (GHC 7.4 using -O2) Daniel’s ByteString Version This is much improved, … Read more
Alternatively you can pattern match: case maybeValue of Just value -> … Nothing -> …
TL;DR: some is one or more, many is 0 or more results collected from performing the same computation over and over by the familiar maximal munch rule. For this to make sense, some state passing (and alteration) must take place reducing the domain of possibilities somehow, otherwise it will repeat ad infinitum. And state passing … Read more
Yes (+) is part of the Num typeclass, and everyone seems to feel you can’t define (*) etc for your type, but I strongly disagree. newtype Pair a b = Pair (a,b) deriving (Eq,Show) I think Pair a b would be nicer, or we could even just use the type (a,b) directly, but… This is … Read more