Transmitting Haskell values

[Ben Escoto]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 17:09:36 +0100
Joachim Durchholz <joachim.durchholz at web.de> wrote:
> In all, I'm finding it rather difficult to find my way in the 
> documentation (just as a data point for the documentation folks).
> To make the critique helpful instead of just a critique, here are a few 
> ideas of what might have helped me (YMMV):

Yes, I agree.  The best way to learn seems to be to just sequentially
read through all the libraries, keeping everything in the back of your
mind.  When there is no text, look at the type signature and name and
try to guess what it does.  When there is something odd, ask yourself
why whoever wrote GHC would want something like that.

There is some stuff that uses technical words like Monoid or Unboxed,
so if you don't know what those mean, look up those concepts in google
(either web or comp.lang.functional) and read random posts, pages, and
academic papers about them.  Finally the design of some stuff (esp
monadaic things like STRef) is complicated and won't make sense until
you try to use them in a sample program.

At least that was/is my experience.  :)  It's not a totally unpleasant
way of learning a language, but quite different than with most
languages.  Also it doesn't work if you're in hurry...


-- 
Ben Escoto
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