Hello Simon,
Wednesday, July 11, 2007, 11:38:31 AM, you wrote:
> So Greg's idea (or at least my understanding thereof) is to write it like
> this:
> do { f $(stuff1) $(stuff2) }
Simon, it is thing i dreamed for a years! Haskell has serious drawback
for imperative programming compared to C - each action should be
written as separate statement and this makes program too wordy - just
try to rewrite something like x[i] += y[i]*z[i] in Haskell
i need a way to perform actions and read data values inside
calculations. there are two possible ways:
* write pure expressions like we do in C and let's ghc guess yourself
where evaluation should be added:
x <- newIORef 1
y <- newIORef 1
z <- newIORef 1
f x (y*z)
this means that any expression of type IORef a or IO a automatically
translated into evaluation. the same should work for arrays, hashes
and so on, so it probably should be a class. the problem, of course, is
that IO/IORef/.. is a first class values so it's hard to distinguish
where it should be evaluated and where used as is. another problem is
its interaction with type inference - we may not know which concrete
type this expression has
* add an explicit operation which evaluates data, as you suggests.
again, it should be a class which allows to add evaluation support for
hashes/...
actually, ML has something similar - it uses "." operation to evaluate
variable values
=
and, while we on this topic, another problem for imperative
programming style usability is control structures. how we can rewrite
the following:
delta=1000
while (delta>0.01)
x = ...
if (x<0) break
delta = abs(n-x*x)
=
btw, proposal of "prefix expressions" also simplifies imperative
programs a bit: now we should write something like this:
when (a>0) $ do
.
while this proposal allows to omit "$" and make program look a bit more
natural
=
one more complaint: the syntax
for list $ \item -> do
doesn't look too natural compared to other languages. it will be great to
write it as
for item in list do
- of course, with 'for' still a plain function defined by user
=
may be, i should collect all these ideas on "imperative programming"
page?
--
Best regards,
Bulatmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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