[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 tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com
Thu Jun 21 04:27:58 EDT 2007


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


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list