Top Level TWI's again was Re: [Haskell] Re: Parameterized Show

[Lennart Augustsson]

Adrian Hey wrote:
>>But toplevel
>>things with identity (TWI) are evil as well, *especially* if they are
>>easy to use.
> 
> 
> Just repeating this again and again doesn't make it any more true. Neither
> you or any of the other nay-sayers have provided any evidence or credible
> justification for this assertion, nor have any of you provided any workable
> alternative for even the simplest example. Lennart has yet to explain how he
> proposes to implement his supposedly safer "openDevice". You have yet to
> explain how you propose to deal with stdout etc..

Personally, I can't believe I hear people arguing for global variables.
I thought that went away 30 years ago.  It has nothing to do with
functional programming.

As for openDevice, if a device should only allow a single open I would
assume this is part of the device driver in the operating system?
(I know this is shifting blame.  But I think it shifts it to where it
belongs.  In the OS there will be an "open" flag per device.)

I admit there are proper uses of global variables, but they are very
rare.  You have not convinced me you have one.

	-- Lennart