On 20/01/2005, at 11:06 PM, Keean Schupke wrote:
I find it no harder than writing with monads for example... certainly there are some
tricky things going on in both... but that doesn't stop people using monads for IO,
state etc.
Syntactic sugar over the top for instance and implementation definitions is something
we are working on (using template-haskell) - so that end of things can certainly be
made neater for the user.
The syntactic sugar is the killer. (Using monads is really no fun if you don't have do notation, for example. Doable: yes. Pretty: definitely not!) Even if you use Template Haskell to try to implement the syntactic sugar, you're very limited by the splice $(...) notation at the call site. I've always argued that Haskell really should have a full-blown macro system: it would really help with Haskell and EDSLs, and of course for integrating these kinds of libraries. TH is 90% of the way there, and with a bit more thought, those pesky splices could just magically disappear ... ;)
The big problem I guess is error messages - and that would require some user
defined way of throwing compile time errors.
Yes, also agreed. I did some similar Haskell<->OO integration work, and the type errors which appeared when something went wrong are quite awesome. User-defined compile-time errors would be fantastic, but that would require quite a lot of effort.
-- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save <http://www.algorithm.com.au/> _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
