Arrows in Elm's method signature

Let's look at the documentation of length function of String in Elm.

It's here and it looks like this.

length : String -> Int

> String.length "Hello World"
11 : Int

If we look at the similar feature in Ruby world then we get length method.

length -> integer

Method signature in ruby's documentation and Elm's documentation is quite similar. Both return an integer.

In Elm's world method definitions are called "Type Annotations". Going forward that's what I'm going to use in this blog.

Now let's look at method definition of slice method in Ruby.

It looks like this.

slice(start, length) -> new_str or nil

irb(main):006:0> "snakes on a plane!".slice(0,6)
=> "snakes"

In Elm world it looks like this.

slice : Int -> Int -> String -> String

> String.slice  0  6 "snakes on a plane!"
"snakes" : String

Questions is what's up with all those arrows.