[Haskell-cafe] [Newbie] Quest for inheritance

[Ralf Lammel]

There are tons of good research questions readily waiting.

Such as:

- What would we want to explore in OOish Haskell so that we, once more,
can provide interesting input for mainstream language development? More
specifically: what sorts of type inference would make a difference in
Java 1.5+, C# 2.0+?

- How would Haskell's type-class type system need to evolve in order to
provide completely satisfying programmer experience for the uses of
type classes in the various existing styles of OOish Haskell
programmning?

- We have Template Haskell but we are *still* rather lame when doing
(OOish) language extensions. Macro systems with syntax extensions
perhaps really open up a wormhole but nevertheless: *how* can we get a
more experimental Haskell environment where language experiments make a
good impression at the level of syntactic sugar, debugging, error
messages, and all that?

- How is it possible that Haskell lacks true extensible functions
(modulo the kind of encoding I sent around earlier)? This is one of the
big immediate benefits of OO mainstream programming. Seeing Haskell
not providing them, makes me feel sad. It is also amazing that Haskell
scores with complicated modes of extensibility (cf. monad transformers),
but has no watertight answer when it comes to silly extensible datatypes
(or classes) and functions (or methods) defined upon those.

- ...

Let's go to Sydney :-)
(Or at the very least, let's meet at the Haskell Workshop!)

Ralf

> -----Original Message-----
> From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-
> bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Roberts
> Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 12:15 AM
> To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] [Newbie] Quest for inheritance
> 
> I don't think this is publishable research, there is too much other
> stuff already out there.
> 
> matt
> 
> On 06/06/2005, at 5:58 PM, Gracjan Polak wrote:
> 
> > Matthew Roberts wrote:
> >> I have a project (for an early research student) waiting for an
> >> interested student to take on.  It is called "Programming patterns
> >> for OO-like programming in Haskell".  The basic idea is to identify
> >> how to achieve OO-like organisation of your code in vanilla
haskell.
> >> Hopefully the student can come to a deep understanding of OO and
> >> haskell programming in the process.