[Haskell-cafe] Re: To yi or not to yi, is this really the question? A plea for a cooperative, ubiquitous, distributed integrated development system.

[apfelmus]

Pasqualino 'Titto' Assini wrote:
> Is there any fundamental reasons why Haskell functions/closures cannot be 
> serialised?
> 
> I believe that this is precisely what the distributed version of GHC used to 
> do.
> 
> Most languages, even Java, have a reflection capability to dynamically inspect 
> an object. It is surprising that Haskell doesn't offer it.

Inspecting functions is not referentially transparent. In Haskell,
function equality is extensional, i.e. two functions are equal when
their results are equal on all arguments. Intensional equality would
mean that functions are equal when they have the same representation. If
you allow a function

 serialize :: (Int -> Int) -> String

that can give different results on intensionally different functions,
you may not expect equations like

 f (*3) == f (\n -> n+n+n)

to hold anymore (because f might inspect its argument). Also, having
"serialize" somehow check whether intensionally different arguments are
extensionally the same and should have a unique serialization is no
option because this problem is undecidable.

Regards,
apfelmus