Thanks for stopping by. While attempting to reproduce this, I discovered what the problem was - it was really fac.hs.txt, but, of course, the .txt extension was hidden. Stupidity on my part, alas.

As far as the language difference, I recognize that this isn’t a trivial fix. At the very least, however, you should make it clear, maybe a dialog or some such when you first start it up, that Haskell apparently has multiple variant dialects, and the example programs that work in one won’t work in another.

Let’s face it - if you were in my shoes, and you wanted to learn this language you’d seen everyone raving about called “ShoeHorse”. So you download a program called WinShod, that indicates it is based on the ShoeHorse 98 standard. And then you proceed to ShoeHorse.org and attempt to use some of the tutorials there to write some programs.

If those programs don’t work, and there’s no indication that there are different dialects, you’d get pretty frustrated pretty quickly.

To be clear: I’m not blaming you for the behavior, the dialects or anything else. I’m just saying, as a casual “toe dipper”, this experience was far less friendly than I would have expected, and I can only imagine how many other people have had similar, or worse experiences and just haven’t written about them.

jb

I wrote WinHugs, so I’m curious to find out what the issue you are having with Open is. You click the “Open” button, browse to the file (whereever it is) and select it. Click the Open button and thats it.

The underlying Hugs provides the let’s etc, so is a bit beyond what I can change, but if there is something that makes Open non-intuative then I’d love to hear about it. If you send an email to haskell-cafe -AT- haskell.org, describing exactly what you did, and what you expected to happen, I’ll definately spot that.

Thanks

Neil
(WinHugs developer)

Type for help
Hugs.Base> let myNum = 7 in myNum
7
Hugs.Base> let square x = x * x in square 7
49
Hugs.Base> let fac n = if n == 0 then 1 else n * fac (n-1) in fac 7
5040

However, most of the things you’ve tried to do are using GHCi syntax. You’ll probably prefer to install GHCi and start there:


$ ghci
Prelude> let myNum = 7
Prelude> myNum
7
Prelude> let square x = x * x
Prelude> square 7
49
Prelude> square 8
64
Prelude> let fac n = if n == 0 then 1 else n * fac (n-1)
Prelude> fac 7
5040


Now say we go and put some code in the file /tmp/A.hs:


fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)


We can load and run that code in GHCi:


Prelude> :l /tmp/A.hs
*Main> take 10 fibs
[1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55]


Or Hugs:
Hugs.Base> :l /tmp/A.hs
Main> take 10 fibs
[1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55]


And off you go!