On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> Compete in the space of professional production quality languages?
>
> I am sorry, but if one day the Haskell, or any other language creators
> decide to include *everything* into their language, it will be The End
> of it.
Yes that comment went too far. My point was not that Haskell must
implement all this functionality, but that absence of an ability (in
principle) to maintain persistent state easily would be a serious
shortcoming. I understood some of the posts I saw to indicate that it
would be difficult, in principle, to provide a relatively transparent
persistence system. e.g.
> I am afraid that storing under binary format the internal objects under
> user control might be difficult in a pure lazy language. There is no
> difference between closures and their reduced results, the referential
> transparence should be maintained. Moreover functions in Haskell do
> not belong to Eq.
Given that a huge amount of modern programming involves databases and
persistence (especially in a web environment), this strikes me as a huge
issue. Of course, one might argue that Haskell programmers should just
call out to external database api's via Corba/DCOM. But, given that most
DBMS provide a declarative interface, and some provide atomic transactions
and object versioning, it should be possible to have a smoother storage
interface than that of pure Corba/DCOM API calls.
-Alex-
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S. Alexander Jacobson i2x Media
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