I have been working with a Haskell text for the past couple of months or so and I have some general problem solving questions.

1. Is there a way to output intermediate values of a calculation? As an imperative programmer I have become used to using "System.out"'s or 'cout's to check that my function works as intended. I can see no easy way to do that in Haskell. The only solution I could come up with was to avoid using nested functions except for the most trivial expressions and test all expressions in the interpreter. This approach seems to make my code ugly and less readable.

2. Haskell is great because it makes abstracting from problem very easy. For example, if the problem asks for the area of a square, why not write a function to compute the area of all polygons? find myself falling into the trap of generalizing to the point that a simple problem becomes quite a bit harder . From a general design perspective should I concentrate on abstracting away just enough to solve the problem or solve the harder problem in the hoping of reusing that code to make life easier in the future?


Thanks....
Deech


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