Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
I'm only using |> as a replacement
for $ because I find it more readable to read left to right than right
to left.
You can see this in two different ways, I think. Imagine the following:
(+1) (*2) 3
This is not legal Haskell because it gets parsed as:
((+1) (*2)) 3
To avoid this problem, we can add our own brackets:
(+1) ((*2) 3)
Speaking loosely, $ is an alternative to the brackets, so we can also write:
(+1) $ (*2) 3
We get the answer 7 whether we use brackets or $. If $ is going to be
an alternative to brackets, we would be a bit surprised if the
evaluation order changed. At the same time, it's true that if you think
of this as a Unix pipe, the evaluation order is the wrong way round. We
are evaluating right to left.
Arrows are meant to be like Unix pipes. The whole idea is that you
build up pipelines (and networks) of arrows. Usefully for you,
functions are a kind of arrow, so you get the arrow operators
automatically. As expected
((+1) >>> (*2)) 3
gives 8 and not 7.
Arrows looks like a replacement for monads. Are you saying
I should drop my use of the State monad? If so, why? I like the
readability of the do syntax.
Okay, now it's my turn to ask a question. :-) I've read about arrows,
and while I think I see what they do, I'm not sure why they are seen as
so special that they even get new syntax. This question of Shannon's is
exactly the point I struggle with. I can see that the arrow operators
might be useful with functions, but are they useful for other things
too? For example, as monads are one kind of arrow, I thought I would
make some of the I/O functions into arrows and see what happened. The
result was pretty much the same as using the monad, except slightly less
convenient.
I've been trying to use the arrow interface to HXT, but I don't see why
it works better with arrows rather than functions. The arrows all do
various transformations on the XML, but isn't that the idea of a
function? Couldn't processTopDown, for example, be a function that maps
an input XML tree to an output one, and takes a lambda expression which
is to be applied to each node?
Thanks,
Pete
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