Ronald J. Legere writes:
>
> While perusing the newsgroups, I came across a post (of the same subject
> as above, if you want to find it on deja news) by Bertrand Meyer (Eiffel)
> suggesting "Haskell (http://www.haskell.org) shouldn't really be a
> separate programming language, but rather an Eiffel library." and that
> someone should write it. I think this is driven by the recent addition of
> closure like 'agents' (http://www.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/language/agent/).
> in eiffel (including anonymous functions). It is not clear what this
> library should do (lazy evaluation maybe?) but I was quite fascinated to
> see that Meyer is learning the joys of haskell :)
I read the discussion, and it sounded to me more like an expression of
contempt on Meyer's part ("_shouldn't_ really be a separate language").
I only know the basics of Eiffel, but it seems unlikely that a significant
part of Haskell could be encapsulated as an Eiffel library. Meyer suggested
using (what we know as) closures to encode lazy evaluation (looked like a
call-by-name CPS translation), but someone rightly shot this down in a reply.
Anyway, the type system is at least as (more, IMO) important to Haskell as its
evaluation regime, and I find it hard to imagine a reasonable embedding of it
in Eiffel's. It seems far easier to do the reverse!
BTW, the most interesting thing I discovered was that DejaNews hosts a forum
which mirrors the Haskell list. It's called "fa.haskell".
--
Frank Atanassow, Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University
Padualaan 14, PO Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands
Tel +31 (030) 253-1012, Fax +31 (030) 251-3791
