[Haskell-cafe] I love type declarations. :-)

[Daniel Carrera]

Hey,

Whooo hoo! I just finished my first non-trivial Haskell program. It's 
the pseudo-random number generator from RC4. And if it weren't for type 
declarations I'd still be bug-hunting.

I've been trying to get the PRNG to work for two days, but Hugs kept 
wanting to use Integer where Int should be used, ugh. But while reading 
a Haskell tutorial I came accross type declarations:

function ::  Int -> Int -> [Int]

This solved all my problems! I added proper type declarations to 
everything, and suddenly Hugs was happy. Type declarations also brought 
other benefits:

1) I quickly spoted two bugs I hadn't hit yet.
2) I removed the fromIntegral() functions, making the code cleaner.
3) And my code is self-documented.

Before, when writing imperative code, I would add a comment for each 
function describing its input and output. Now type declarations provide 
that, so I merely describe what the function does. And type declarations 
are better than a comment because Haskell helps me make sure that they 
are right.

Go Haskell!

Cheers,
Daniel.