Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gottlobflegel 1313 days ago
> This is realllly unidiomatic in real world Haskell.

Yet it is the actual behaviour in the stdlib Prelude.
3 comments
cies 1312 days ago
Yes. Because it's hard to remove things from the stdlib. More languages suffer from that.

What's nice is that the Haskell community offers several alternative Preludes; mostly fixing the problem you describe.

Hence I find the example a bit disingenuous.

link
1-more 1313 days ago
Yep. I think it is needed to satisfy some category theory thing but I never got a good answer on that. I like to use nri-prelude since I went from Elm to Haskell and it has the same idioms, to wit `head : List a -> Maybe a`.
link
tome 1312 days ago
From GHC 9.6 there will be a warning against using head or tail. We don't actually want to remove them (yet) since that would break a lot of code.
link