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

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 10:05:40PM +0100, Pasqualino 'Titto' Assini wrote:
> Most languages, even Java, have a reflection capability to dynamically
> inspect an object.

_Even_ Java? That's a strange point of view considering how much money
went into this technology.

I also find it hard to believe that most languages have reflection,
especially those which are traditionally focused on efficiency and
compilation to native code, like C, C++, Fortran, Pascal, etc.

How many languages with reflection can you list?

> It is surprising that Haskell doesn't offer it.

It is surprising that it is surprising to you :-)

I think the reasons are mostly insufficient resources and not enough
interest to justify the effort. I think an interesting lesson about this
comes from the effort that went into Template Haskell (which, BTW,
offers some kind of compile time reflection) - this was probably very
hard to design and implement, but my impression is that it's not widely
used, despite being "cool" and useful.

Best regards
Tomek