On Dec 20, 2011, at 11:18 PM, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
> Tillmann Rendel wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Robert Clausecker wrote:
>>> Image you would create your own language with a paradigm similar to
>>> Haskell or have to chance to change Haskell without the need to keep any
>>> compatibility. What stuff would you add to your language, what stuff
>>> would you remove and what problems would you solve completely different?
>> I would try to improve the language's support for the embedding of
>> domain-specific embedded languages (aka. combinator libraries). Such
>> embedding requires the integration of a domain-specific language's syntax,
>> static semantics and dynamic semantics. Some (more or less far fetched)
>> ideas about these three areas follow.
>
> I think this is a very good point. The things I would like to see:
>
> * Better syntax for observable sharing. Doaitse Swierstra proposed a
> "grammer" construct that is basically a let statement where the binder
> names can be observed. I'm not entirely sure whether that is the most general
> or sufficient syntax, but something along these lines.
>
> * Meta-programming / partial evaluation. When designing a DSL, it is often
> the case that you know how to write an optimizing compiler for your DSL
> because it's usually a first-order language. However, trying to squeeze that
> into GHC rules is hopeless. Having some way of compiling code at run-time
> would solve that. Examples:
> ** Conal Elliott's image description language Pan
> ** Henning Thielemann's synthesizer-llvm
I am not disagreeing with anything that you have said here, but in a way it
seems like the problem is more fundamental than all of these things since
metaprogramming and type-programming in Haskell is not first-class, so it
really isn't a language that is designed for DSLs even though people get a
surprisingly long way abusing it for this purpose. :-) Really what we need is
a language built from the ground up for this purpose, such as Lisp, but without
the parts of Lisp that cause us to use Haskell instead. :-)
Cheers,
Greg
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