> Can someone give a brief comparison of the FRP approach with
> O'Haskell? Both frameworks seem to revolve around asynchronous
> interaction between objects in continuous time. The O'Haskell
> folks argue that you need a new language to express this activity
> well. The FRP folk seem happy with Haskell as is.
I am only vaguely familiar with O'Haskell, and actually did not know
that it had a notion of reactivity, so I perused:
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~nordland/ohaskell/survey.html
to find out more. I think it's safe to say that reactivity in O'Haskell
is very imperative, and tightly coupled to its notion of objects and
state. You "send messages" to objects to invoke methods that alter
local state, etc. It looks very much like conventional OO, unless I'm
missing something. In contrast, reactivity in FRP is much more
declarative. Stateful things are captured via recursion, or through
combinators that are analogous to fold, etc. There is very little
infrastructure to implement FRP; with O'Haskell it looks rather enormous
(i.e. it is a new language).
> FRAN handles events (e.g. mouseclicks). Is there any reason it
> couldn't handle network events too?
No reason whatsoever. For example, in our work in robotics, we use
events such as bumper press as input, and robot commands as output, all
of the time.
> Where does FRP fail such that a new language is required?
> If the two systems are complimentary, how would FRP be enhanced by
> O'Haskell?
The two systems and resulting styles of programming are so different
that I don't know how to answer these questions.
-Paul
