[Haskell-cafe] Re: Getting my feet wet - not in Haskell though

[rossberg at ps.uni-sb.de]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> I'll move on to the alternatives - Alice ML and/or Clean. Both can
> serialize without forcing lazy subexpressions.

I don't know about Clean, but with respect to Alice ML this is not
correct: Alice ML uniformly blocks on futures upon pickling, including
lazy ones.

Sometimes you may want to pickle lazy suspensions as such, but more often
it is not what you want. In particular, the suspension can easily be
larger than its result, and the closure may contain resources which cannot
be pickled. If such a suspension was produced by an abstraction you may
even argue that making contained resources observable partially breaks the
abstraction. To adhere to uniformity, strong abstraction, and the
Principle of Least Surprise, we thus chose to force lazy futures in Alice
ML.

> No FUD, please ;-)
>
> And yes I know there are devils lurking in every language and
> environment. I'm pretty sure that Haskell has a few others to offer, too.
> (There's still no good introduction to Monads, for example. One that's
> understandable for a programmer who knows his Dijkstra well but no
> category theory. And a few other things.)

No FUD, please ;-) ;-)

Cheers,
- Andreas