I found the handling of (IO t) by the interpreter (GHCI in my case) to be
somewhat confusing. As pointed out below, I can type:
readFile "bla" :: IO String
and GHCI happily displays the contents of the file. However neither of the
following work
print $ readFile "bla"
putStr $ readFile "bla"
In other words, GHCI seems perfectly willing to "unwrap" a type (IO t) and
display it (assuming Show t). This bit of helpfulness may just confuse us
novice users by allowing us to stray from the correct way to deal with wrapped
types (monads).
content <- readFile "bla"
print content
putStr content
Terry
________________________________
From: Maria Boghiu <maria.bog...@gmail.com>
To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Sent: Monday, October 5, 2009 6:48:56 AM
Subject: [Haskell-cafe] I/O Haskell question
Hey.
I'm trying to configure Xmonad, the window manager.
for this purpose, I'm trying to read the workspaces variable in the code below
from file.
As you can see, I do workspaces = readWS where
readWS = do
l <- readFile "~/bla"
return l
I get an error saying I am mismatching types IO [String] and [String].
But I thought that once one does l <- readFile "~/bla", l is the a string or,
in this case, a String list. If I run that line in prelude it seems to be
working fine, prints the content of the file "~/bla" on screen (though I'm not
sure if as a String or as a list of Strings, i.e. [String])_______________________________________________
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