> > Purely functional languages like Haskell are excellent > > within certain niches, but non-trivial problems exist with language > > interoperability between lazy and strict languages. > > > > I believe that is uncontroversial.
Actually, I think Haskell has one of the better language interoperability stories going and that lazy-vs-strict is a very well solved problem. Problems that do crop up in interfacing to foreign languages are: 1) Differences in type system. Any two languages are bound to have some differences between their type systems and there's always going to be some problems dealing with that. OO and type-classes happen to be superficially similar and yet radically different. These happen with any two languages. Thought they are probably more of an issue because of... 2) Attitudes to type safety. C programmers overcome any type incompatibility with void* and type casts. Haskell programmers look for ways to avoid doing so. This can occupy many a happy evening :-) (I don't know if the situation has changed but the SML-NJ folks used to have a very simple foreign function interface which made type errors appallingly easy to make. This seemed to be quite acceptable to them whereas Haskell's ffi was designed to make type errors much harder to make. Which approach is the right one?) 3) Attitudes to grunge. C programmers are used to having complicated, fragile-looking interfaces so it's quite common to do things like passing a function an array and a count of how many things are in the array. Haskell programmers look for ways to avoid such fragility but, of course, it takes more up-front effort to develop a safer interface and gives you a good solid push down that slippery slope of perfectionism on which Haskell folk so often find themselves. And, in the specific case of GUI programming, I think there's been a problem of not enough people, too many ideas on how GUI programming should be done, and too many GUI libs to try interfacing to. (Obviously, if we'd worked on Windows exclusively, there would have been less choice so we'd have been more focused.) -- Alastair Reid _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
