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Programming in Haskell: Chapter 9 - Interactive Programs

This document discusses interactive programs in Haskell. It explains that Haskell programs are traditionally pure functions without side effects, while interactive programs need to perform input/output which are side effects. It introduces the IO type to represent actions that may perform side effects when evaluated. It provides examples of basic IO actions like getChar to read input and putChar to write output. It also shows how to sequence actions together to build more complex interactive programs, and provides examples like a program that reads a string from the user and prints its length.

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Sanyam Rastogi
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106 views21 pages

Programming in Haskell: Chapter 9 - Interactive Programs

This document discusses interactive programs in Haskell. It explains that Haskell programs are traditionally pure functions without side effects, while interactive programs need to perform input/output which are side effects. It introduces the IO type to represent actions that may perform side effects when evaluated. It provides examples of basic IO actions like getChar to read input and putChar to write output. It also shows how to sequence actions together to build more complex interactive programs, and provides examples like a program that reads a string from the user and prints its length.

Uploaded by

Sanyam Rastogi
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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PROGRAMMING IN HASKELL

Chapter 9 - Interactive Programs


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Introduction
To date, we have seen how Haskell can be used to write batch programs that take all their inputs at the start and give all their outputs at the end.

inputs

batch program

outputs

However, we would also like to use Haskell to write interactive programs that read from the keyboard and write to the screen, as they are running.

keyboard

inputs

interactive program

outputs

screen
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The Problem
Haskell programs are pure mathematical functions:

Haskell programs have no side effects. However, reading from the keyboard and writing to the screen are side effects:
Interactive programs have side effects.
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The Solution
Interactive programs can be written in Haskell by using types to distinguish pure expressions from impure actions that may involve side effects.

IO a

The type of actions that return a value of type a.


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For example:
IO Char

The type of actions that return a character.

IO ()

The type of purely side effecting actions that return no result value.

Note: () is the type of tuples with no components.


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Basic Actions
The standard library provides a number of actions, including the following three primitives:
The action getChar reads a character from the keyboard, echoes it to the screen, and returns the character as its result value:
getChar :: IO Char
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The action putChar c writes the character c to the screen, and returns no result value:
putChar :: Char IO ()

The action return v simply returns the value v, without performing any interaction:

return :: a IO a
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Sequencing
A sequence of actions can be combined as a single composite action using the keyword do. For example:
a :: IO (Char,Char) a = do x getChar

getChar
y getChar return (x,y)
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Derived Primitives
Reading a string from the keyboard:
getLine :: IO String getLine = do x getChar if x == '\n' then return [] else do xs getLine return (x:xs)
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Writing a string to the screen:


putStr :: String IO () putStr [] = return () putStr (x:xs) = do putChar x putStr xs

Writing a string and moving to a new line:


putStrLn :: String IO () putStrLn xs = do putStr xs putChar '\n'
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Example
We can now define an action that prompts for a string to be entered and displays its length:
strlen :: IO ()

strlen

= do putStr "Enter a string: "


xs getLine putStr "The string has "

putStr (show (length xs))


putStrLn " characters"
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For example:
> strlen Enter a string: abcde The string has 5 characters

Note: Evaluating an action executes its side effects, with the final result value being discarded.
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Hangman
Consider the following version of hangman: One player secretly types in a word. The other player tries to deduce the word, by entering a sequence of guesses. For each guess, the computer indicates which letters in the secret word occur in the guess.
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The game ends when the guess is correct. We adopt a top down approach to implementing hangman in Haskell, starting as follows:
hangman :: IO () hangman = do putStrLn "Think of a word: " word sgetLine putStrLn "Try to guess it:" guess word
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The action sgetLine reads a line of text from the keyboard, echoing each character as a dash:
sgetLine :: IO String sgetLine = do x getCh if x == '\n' then do putChar x return [] else do putChar '-' xs sgetLine return (x:xs)
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Note: The action getCh reads a character from the keyboard, without echoing it to the screen. This useful action is not part of the standard library, but is a special Hugs primitive that can be imported into a script as follows:
primitive getCh :: IO Char

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The function guess is the main loop, which requests and processes guesses until the game ends.
guess :: String IO () guess word = do putStr "> " xs getLine if xs == word then putStrLn "You got it!" else do putStrLn (diff word xs) guess word
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The function diff indicates which characters in one string occur in a second string:
diff :: String String String

diff xs ys =

[if elem x ys then x else '-' | x xs]

For example:
> diff "haskell" "pascal" "-as--ll"
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Exercise
Implement the game of nim in Haskell, where the rules of the game are as follows: The board comprises five rows of stars:
1: 2: 3: 4: 5: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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Two players take it turn about to remove one or more stars from the end of a single row. The winner is the player who removes the last star or stars from the board.

Hint: Represent the board as a list of five integers that give the number of stars remaining on each row. For example, the initial board is [5,4,3,2,1].
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