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

[Ben.Yu at combined.com]

Some people say that ocaml's object system is kinda useless. The best
support I hear so far was:"it does not hurt"

implementation inheritance, the strange "#" syntax, virtual method, why do
I need them?

In Java, people are doing programming-against-interface, implementation
injection etc. All these show that we don't need implementation inheritance
to be OO, and implementation inheritance is in many cases bad practice
anyway.

As somebody pointed out, we could do interface in Haskell with record. The
only problem is names. If we could, as we can in OO languages, provide a
separate namespace for the fields of each record. We are pretty much done.

The rest is some kind of record coersion+row polymorphism mechanism.


If haskell can do what Simon P. Jones and Mark Jones described in the paper
<<Lightweight Extensible Records for Haskell>>, I'd say it is a already a
nice functional OO language.
Compared to Ocaml, 'OO' support is seamlessly integrated with the
functional part. It leaves no redundancy, no overlapping in the language.


In short, what if we don't create an object piece that competes with the
functional part, but fix and enhance the record system that we currently
have?


Ben.


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