[Haskell-cafe] Haskell's overlooked object system: was OO idioms redux

[oleg at pobox.com]

Just to clarify: the intent of the OOHaskell paper is to show that
Haskell, *as it is*, already has an OO system that is at least as
powerful as that found in C++, Java, Eiffel, OCaml. Actually, it is
strictly more powerful than the OO systems of C++, Java, Eiffel.

In OCaml, the Object system is an extension, with its own extensive
syntax and _quite non-trivial_ type system. We show that we can do the
same in Haskell without any extensions, and roughly in the same syntax
(that is, modulo the usual syntactic differences between non-OO OCaml
and Haskell).

It is not our intent to pass judgment as to whether an
implementation inheritance or multiple inheritance are good or bad. We
merely want to show:

	- if you want implementation inheritance, here's how you do it
in Haskell, roughly in the same syntax as in other OO languages, and
with the same semantics as in other OO languages

	- if you want interface inheritance, here's how you do it in
Haskell, roughly in the same syntax and with the same semantics

	- if you want multiple inheritance, here's ....

	- if you want open recursion and selective closing of open
recursion, here's ...

Ditto for virtual and private methods, objects in ST monad,
overriding, polymorphic classes and methods. I'd really like to hear
if there are OO buzzwords we have missed...

Again, we do *not* propose to extend Haskell in any way. We do not
need to introduce special subclassing and subtyping judgments into
the type system, deal with co- and contra-variance and the implicit
weirdly-typed 'this', etc. The existing typechecker does all this 
for us. 

Our aim is to clarify the relation between object systems and
typeclasses, to clarify various, often quite baroque, OO type systems,
and provide a lightweight library and a set of guidelines to let one
play with an OO of their preference using existing Haskell
implementations. You can use as many or as few OO features in Haskell
as you wish.