A Gentle Introduction to Haskell, Version 98 This is the master HTML version of the Gentle Introduction To Haskell, version 98. Revised June, 2000 by Reuben Thomas. You may download the following: Brief Table of Contents. All code in this tutorial, with additional commentary, is found in the code directory packaged with this tutorial. Premission is granted to correct, improve, or enhance this document. Copyright (C) 1999 Paul Hudak, John Peterson and Joseph Fasel Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of "A Gentle Introduction to Haskell" (the Text), to deal in the Text without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Text, and to permit persons to whom the Text is furnished to do so, subject to the following condition: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Text.
Haskell: The Confusing Parts If you’re used to the C family of languages, or the closely related family of “scripting languages,” Haskell’s syntax (mainly) is a bit baffling at first. For some people, it can even seem like it’s sneaking out from under you every time you think you understand it. This is sort of a FAQ for people who are new to Haskell, or scared away by its syntax. Use this as a cheat sheet, not a textbook. Misc. Quick review, because if you’ve heard of Haskell, you should also have heard of most of this. foo :: Bar baz -> Bar quux is a type signature for the function foo, where Bar baz is the type of argument it takes, and Bar quux is the type of the return value. There’s no null and no void. Haskell’s syntax is indirectly based on ML, so if you stop reading here and go learn OCaml instead, some of this information will still be kinda useful. Type Names and Constructors There are two completely separate namespaces in any Haskell source file: The value namespace, and the type namespace. Statements vs.