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

[Graham Klyne]

At 22:17 13/10/04 +0200, Ralf Laemmel wrote:
>John Goerzen wrote:
>
>>One of the best features of OO programming is that of inheritance.
>>...
>
>Oleg, Keean and me have lying around a draft that adds to this
>discussion. We reconstruct OCaml's tutorial in Haskell
>The short paper version is online and under consideration for FOOL:
>http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/OOHaskell/
>This work takes advantage of the HList library.
>
>I'll attach some code related to inheritance.
>So Haskell is an OOPL.

I think that's interesting as a theoretical exercise, but I don't currently 
see myself using that framework in practice, in the form presented.  As you 
say "Simply syntactic sugar would make OOP more convenient in Haskell."

It is encouraging to see that the OO structures can be constructed within 
the Haskell type system.  Would it simplify your approach significantly to 
focus on non-mutable objects?  (In recent discussions with a colleague who 
implements complex systems in Java, he has observed that their systems are 
easier to understand and maintain when they elect to use non-mutable objects.)

#g


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Graham Klyne
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