In de book Modern C++ design, Andrei Alexandrescu writes that Haskell supports “multi-methods”
http://books.google.com/books?id=aJ1av7UFBPwC&pg=PA3&ots=YPiJ_nWi6Y&dq=moder n+C%2B%2B&sig=FWO6SVfIrgtCWifj9yYHj3bnplQ#PPA263,M1 How is this actually done in Haskell? Maybe this is just a basic feature of Haskell which I don't grasp yet because of my object-oriented background? A good example is collision between pairs of objects of type (a,b). In object oriented languages this cannot be handled in a nice way, because neither a.Collide(b) or b.Collide(a) is the correct approach; one would like to write (a,b).Collide() A specific example might be better here. Assume the following class hierarchy: Solid | +-- Asteroid | +-- Planet | + -- Earth | + -- Jupiter Using multi-methods, I could write (in pseudo code) collide (Asteroid, Planet) = "an asteroid hit a planet" collide (Asteroid, Earth) = "the end of the dinos" collide (Solid,Solid) = " solids collided" collide (Planet, Asteroid) = collide (Asteroid, Planet) collide (Earth, Asteroid) = collide (Earth, Asteroid) So basically, the "best" collide function is picked, depending on the type of the arguments. How should I write Haskell code for something like this in general, in the sense that this hierarchy is typically huge and the matrix (of collide functions for each pair of types) is very sparse. Thanks, Peter No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.11.6/938 - Release Date: 05/08/2007 16:16 _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
