It strikes me that this question may be related (perhaps distantly) to Godel's incompleteness theorem. Anyone else see similarities here?
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Johannes Waldmann <waldm...@imn.htwk-leipzig.de> wrote: > Dear all, > > It's not exactly Haskell-specific, but ... > I am trying to track down the origin of the proverb > > "the existence (or: need for) a preprocessor > shows omissions in (the design of) a language." > > > I like to think that in Haskell, we don't need > preprocessors since we can manipulate programs > programmatically, because they are data. > > In other words, a preprocessor realizes higher order > functions, and you only need this if your base language > is first-order. > > Yes, that's vastly simplified, and it does not cover > all cases, what about generic programming > (but this can be done via Data.Data) > and alex/happy (but we have parsec) etc etc. > > Best regards, J.W. > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe