Questions and answers

Feel free to ask your questions here. Please sign your question using four tildes (~~~~). Questions and answers will be organised as they are added, and linked from here. We don't have much here yet, but the Haskell Newbie page on the old wiki has quite a few questions and answers you can look through.

• Is this a good place to ask questions? MathematicalOrchid 15:30, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, that sounded like a 'no'... OK, I'm going to add a few 'real' questions, and see if that gets any more of a response... MathematicalOrchid 11:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• Which is faster? putStr (xs ++ ys ++ xs) or putStr xs; putStr ys; putStr zs? How much of a difference does it make? MathematicalOrchid 11:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• Haskell apparently allows you to write functions with bizarre names like '++' or '***'. What are the rules for this? Which characters can or can't you use? Are you required to give a fixity declaration first, or can you just use them? MathematicalOrchid 11:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• GHC can do all sorts of program optimisations. But, for a given program, how can you tell what it really did when it compiled? Did it inline that function? Was that operation optimised into an in-place update? Is there a way to tell? (Short of using a disassembler that is!) MathematicalOrchid 11:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• Is there a way to make a Haskell program utilise multiple CPUs? (I rephrase: clearly this is very possible theoretically. What I mean is does any known compiler provide a way to do this?) MathematicalOrchid 11:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

• I want to write a program that renders bitmap graphics. Is there any way to get this onto the video screen in Haskell? Is there any way to get the data saved to disk in some sane file format? MathematicalOrchid 11:47, 22 January 2007 (UTC)