[Haskell-cafe] A Mascot

[Jesse Schalken]

I like the idea of a mascot. I like the idea of a lamb called Da, as most
of Haskell's strength comes from it's closeness to pure lambda calculus.

A few things I'd like to see in a mascot:
- Simple. You should be able to draw it in a few seconds.
- Look good in black and white.
- Have obvious features so it is identifiable from a distance.
- Be a little bit cute.

I don't see why ⊥ has to be featured. ⊥ means a computation can terminate
without returning a value. That is a flaw, not a strength. If a computation
may fail, return a Maybe or Either String. If a computation might not
terminate, let it not terminate and I can find out why with my debugger.
That covers all the use cases of ⊥. It also undermines the type system as
beginners often write functions which return ⊥ where they should either be
returning a Maybe or Either String, or expressing the violated precondition
in the type system so it can be tested at compile time. What am I missing?

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 16 November 2011 11:05, MigMit <miguelimo38 at yandex.ru> wrote:
> > Maybe it's just me, but I've thought that being non-strict just means
> that it's possible for a function to produce some value even if it's
> argument doesn't; in other words, that it's possible to have "f (_|_) ≠
> (_|_)". If there was no such thing as (_|_), what would non-strictness mean?
>
> Thanks, non-strictness is indeed defined using ⊥ like you mentioned.
>
> I think I was confusing non-strict evaluation with coinduction. They
> have the same advantages but the latter is less powerful but safer
> than the former.
>
> Bas
>
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