[Haskell-cafe] Functions are first class values in C

[Cristian Baboi]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:55:44 +0200, Peter Verswyvelen <bf3 at telenet.be>  
wrote:

> Before I knew Haskell, the OO community started to embrace the concept  
> of "interfaces" more and more (aka purely abstract classes). Furthermore  
> in OO, many bugs are caused IMO by keeping track of mutable state and  
> caches (which is often premature optimization). So for complicated  
> tasks, I tended to use more and more immutable objects, e.g. objects  
> that could be constructed once, but not mutated. And then I noticed that  
> it was often not needed to precompute all the values that got passed to  
> the constructor, so I added C# "properties" that computed the inner  
> cached values once, lazily.

Lazy constant in C:

int C1 (){
	return 7;
}
C1 is computed only when you apply the operator () to it.

> IMO Haskell embraces the above ideas and much more, with the difference  
> it encapsulates these ideas nicely and concisely, so you need only a  
> fraction of the lines of code :)

This is why we have syntactic sugar :)