[Haskell-cafe] Language extensions

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On May 28, 2007, at 4:13 , Andrew Coppin wrote:

> Haskell 98 does an excellent job of being extremely simple, yet  
> almost unbelievably powerful. Almost every day, I am blown away by  
> how powerful it is. I suppose it just defies belief that you could  
> possibly need even *more* power than is already in the language...  
> and also, as I've mentioned, Haskell being simple is one of the most

*shrug*

Thing is, everything you can do in Haskell you can do in COBOL, as  
they're both Turing-complete.  That doesn't mean you *should*....   
Features such as GADTs make it easier to express some things that are  
harder to express (and harder to read once expressed) in Haskell98;  
as such, they are a positive addition to the language.

Which doesn't mean every program has to use them --- I have yet to  
write any code using GADTs.  But I know they're there, and (roughly)  
how to use them, if I ever do.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH