[Haskell-cafe] let and fixed point operator

[Dan Piponi]

On 8/30/07, jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr
<jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr> wrote:
> Dan Piponi writes:
> > In Haskell, there is no box.
>
> Well, there are boxes...
> But there also thunks and latent, yet-unevaluated graphs...

But the point of Haskell is to provide an abstraction that hides these
details from you. (Though ultimately it's a leaky abstraction and
there comes a point where you do need to know about these things.)

> Anyway, I believe strongly that ALL people who have problems with the
> Haskell protocole, and they are numerous, I teach a good sample of them,
> should be encouraged to learn Prolog.

I'd second that. It's hard to see the difference between declarative
and imperative programming when you only have one instance of a
declarative language from which to generalise.
--
Dan