Re:Why I prefer scheme to Haskell
by prof_hobart on Monday April 09, 2012 @01:38PM
(#3818139)
One obvious reason would be if the input to your expression is relatively large or complex (e.g. a file).
Re:Why I prefer scheme to Haskell
by ericssmith on Monday April 09, 2012 @04:15PM
(#3818991)
That would not be obvious to me. I often have to process quite large and messy XML files and a functional approach works well. I'm not even sure how inserting print statements would be helpful.
Re:Why I prefer scheme to Haskell
by prof_hobart on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @11:37AM
(#3822665)
There may be far better ways of doing it, but for a Haskell beginner (and I'm certainly one of those), being able to quickly display what each function was seeing as its input/returning as its result as it chugged through a complex file would have made life a lot easier for me when I first tried this kind of parsing in Haskell.
Why would you want to do that? Haskell is a functional language. You evaluate expressions, which can be done nicely in GHCI.
When I first learned Haskell, I was also trying to apply my procedural programming habits. Looking back, the pain was a sign of doing it wrong. Once I learned to look at solutions 'functionally', it turned out not to be a big deal, and the resulting code is arguably better. However, it does sometimes become painful going back to procedural languages.