Haskell

In my continued quest to use Haskell for everything, I wrote this today: it creates a simple checksum for a Nokia CIMD2 communications driver that I am writing in PHP.

I needed a second source of verification that my PHP code was doing the right thing so I banged this out in fifteen minutes, warts and all. It may not be "perfect" Haskell but for me to get this done in fifteen minutes has been a real confidence booster, both in reading the error messages and understanding what I am doing.

Ok, following on from last time where we briefly hinted at something called referential transparency and see-through referees. We've only really started to explore all the interesting things that are going on, so to recap, here's the code for the main loop again:

SO, I sat and thought and thought and sat some more and tried to decide what would be a good introduction to doing something useful without repeating all those "hello world" programs or launching straight into to mathematical proof of how many UK politicians it takes to screw up a countries economic system. That would all be too dry.

Instead I came up with the idea of writing a real simple little program that behaves like a REPL, a "read-eval-print loop", familiar to LISP hackers and available for many other languages.

<PROMISE>I hereby solemnly promise not to show any example code ever, ever, ever, never ever on how to implement some utterly irrelevant and ivory-tower function like calculating Fibonnaci numbers, polynomials or bloody pointless recursive things to work out things that most programmers may have heard about when they were in school but ceased to have any meaningful value the minute school-life ended. Ever.</PROMISE>

I got fed up deciding which terminal I wanted and I get fed up constanly editing xmonad.hs and then I had an idea... make it a bash script and then I can hack that any old time! So, first thing to do is create a file somewhere on your path, for me this is /usr/local/bin/xmonad-terminal and put this in it ...