POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : [Plug] It's finally here! : Re: [Plug] It's finally here! Server Time
6 Sep 2024 21:18:49 EDT (-0400)
  Re: [Plug] It's finally here!  
From: Invisible
Date: 10 Oct 2008 09:59:28
Message: <48ef5fc0$1@news.povray.org>
Invisible wrote:
> http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

Hmm. The introduction seems to promise things that don't actually work 
for me. Chapter 1 seems nice, but Chapter 2... is... an entire chapter 
on the type system.

Now *I* understand why this is so. But a Haskell newbie? They're 
probably not going to understand. In normal programming languages, a 
"type" is just a name for a particular data structure. You have integer, 
floating point, character, string, boolean, and then various kinds of 
containers and probably something like a Pascal "record". What's the big 
deal?

Of course, Haskell's type system can do amazing things. In Haskell, 
changing a type signature can completely transform the way your program 
works. It can also wildly affect the efficiency of the code. It can help 
you automatically construct a test suite. And so forth. You can even 
*write programs* as type signatures!!

But none of this is obvious to a Haskell newbie. People used to normal 
languages won't understand what all the fuss is about - and will 
probably just skip the whole chapter...


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