On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Conal Elliott <co...@conal.net> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Creighton Hogg <wch...@gmail.com> wrote: >> <snip> >> I think working on a purely functional widget toolkit would actually >> be a really cool project. Do you have any ideas, though, on what >> should be the underlying primitives? > > Again, my goal would not be a "purely functional" library, because even IO > is "purely functional". My goal is a "denotational" library, i.e., one that > has an elegant (denotational) semantics, and hence is powerfully > compositional and good for reasoning.
Well, that is essentially what I meant but your point about clarity is taken. A truly mathematical semantic model is above & beyond what is meant by "purely functional". >> The initial gut feeling I have is that one should just ignore any >> notion of actually displaying widgets & instead focus on a clean >> algebra of how to 'add' widgets that relates the concepts of >> inheritance & relative position. What I mean by inheritance, here, is >> how to direct a flow of 'events'. I don't necessarily mean events in >> the Reactive sense, because I think it'd be important to make the >> model completely independent of how time & actual UI actions are >> handled. >> >> Any thoughts to throw in, here? >> >> Cheers, >> C > > > The Fruit paper, "Genuinely Functional User Interfaces", gives a semantic > model, which could be a starting place for thinking about possibilities. At > the very least, I'd like to take it to 3D. The idea there is that a UI is a > function from flows (behaviors/signals) to flows, where the input includes > mouse & keyboard stuff and the output includes an image. An image is, as in > Pan, a function from R^2 -> Color, where color includes partial opacity. > When UIs are transformed in time and/or space, they correspondingly see > inversely-transformed input, thanks to a general principle of transforming > functions. Thanks. I'm reading it now. Cheers, C _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
