Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology

Writing an Equivalence Property

Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s begin to write a property on our code. Let’s try an equivalence property.

quickCheck (\s -> (caesar 2 s) == (native_caesar 2 s))

If we try running this, we will quickly encounter a type error.

*Main> quickCheck (\s -> (caesar 2 s) == (native_caesar 2 s))

<interactive>:2:36:
    Couldn't match type 'IO String' with '[Char]'
    Expected type: String
      Actual type: IO String
    In the second argument of '(==)', namely '(native_caesar 2 s)'
    In the expression: (caesar 2 s) == (native_caesar 2 s)

This error comes from a discrepancy in the return types of our Caesar functions. The caesar function returns String, while the native_caesar function returns IO String ...