Journal #8265

Wow, you got Haskell as a first-time programming language? That's harsh. Ouch, seriously

On the other hand...if you don't give up, you should learn certain concepts much faster

I don't know Haskell, but here's a JavaScript solution in case that helps

Click for JSFiddle

Edit: Looks like you've already got a rotate function from a previous exercise, with that method the general process would be something like this:

1. Get list of characters from A-Z:
['A'..'Z']

2. You want to create pairs for each item in the list:
('A', rotate 'A' 5)

3. So, you have the list and the method that converts each item in the list into the result you want. This is called a map, or I think the Haskell term is `list comprehension`:
[(x, rotate x 5) | x <- ['A'..'Z']]

4. Put it in a function , change 5 to an input parameter:
makeKey n = [(x, rotate x n) | x <- ['A'..'Z']]

As I said I don't know Haskell so sorry if this is misleading or incorrect! Also I'm not passing your course for you so don't expect me to give you all your answers

I'm sure you've already come across this but I hear Learn You A Haskell is a great way to learn the language.

I've heard that Haskell is very good for coding AIs but that's about all I know about it.

Better start off with something like python.

Learn You A Haskell is exactly what i'm reading, and with some thought I actually got to that.

the real issue was I had no idea how to do rotate, to which after some thinking I got

rotate :: Int -> [Char] -> [Char]
rotate a xs | a >= 1 && a <= (length xs) = (drop a xs) ++ (take a xs)

| a < 0 = error "the number is negative JUST LIKE YOUR OUTPUT ON LIFE"
| a > (length xs) = error "your rotation is too large LIKE YOUR MOTHER"
| otherwise = xs

to which I could do

makeKey :: Int -> [(Char, Char)]
makeKey rotateChar = zip ['A'..'Z'] (rotate rotateChar ['A'..'Z'])

there's some other stuff I can't do but I guess that's what these tutorial sessions are for.

Never heard of this language! I wish we could upload knowledge like this to our brains, i have no patience/drive to learn coding, yet i would love to know how, good luck! =P

well the speel that our tutor was going on about is that Haskell is a functional language, that it's not object oriented. It's also lazy - ie intelligent, it can figure out a lot of things on its own - but an example of this is like zipping ( putting things from a list and another list together to make a list of pairs ) a small list with an infinite list. Any other language would have to compute the infinite list before zipping it to a small one, whereas haskell will only compute it to the point it needs to.

It's also apparently becoming more prelevant as haskell is very good with multi-core processors and parallel computing, so it's faster than other languages.

but it's also a bitch and nobody uses it

Eh, functional programming exists in many places where it is more useful than a pure functional language like Haskell or Lisp.

That concept of the 'infinite list' is called a generator and exists in many procedural and OO languages like Python (2.3), C# (2.0), JavaScript (1.7), PHP (5.5), and many more. It's certainly not exclusive to Haskell by any means.

Something like this is quite valid in C#:

IEnumerable<int> Numbers()
{
int i = 1;
while(true) yield return i++;
}

var five = Numbers().Take(5); // Contains [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

You've perked my interest, I'm gonna check this language out IM!