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As someone who gave Haskell a shot, I was very quickly put off by having to learn functions to convert from integers to floats, while such things were automatic
by IvarTJ 16y ago
As someone who gave Haskell a shot, I was very quickly put off by having to learn functions to convert from integers to floats, while such things were automatically taken care of by more low-level programming languages such as C.
Also, I was confused by the package management with Cabal, and now I appear to have broken it with an error message whenever I start ghci. When choosing a first language for students, you have to think of idiots such as me.
- wnoise 16y agoI love Haskell. I hate Cabal. It's a bunch of semi-opaque goo on top of a compilation process that wasn't terribly hard to start with.
- sid0 16y agoWhere exactly were you mixing integers and floats? In my experience it doesn't come up too often, and if it does (e.g. writing area = 2 * pi * r) you'd be better served changing the 2 to 2.0.
- IvarTJ 16y agoI sometimes want to avoid using floats because of the inaccuracy that sometimes arise with their use. If I recall correctly, in Haskell division requires the numerator and denominator to be of the class fractional. So how I did integer division was something like this round (fromIntegral x / fromIntegral y) round is one of several functions that transform numbers to integers.
- sid0 16y agoPrelude> 5 `div` 2 2 Haskell's doing the right thing here by having a separate function for integer division. It makes no sense to overload / to mean both regular and integer division.