[Haskell-cafe] Tetris

[Laurent Deniau]

Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
> Conal Elliott wrote:
>> Moreover, functional programming makes it easy to have much more state 
>> than imperative programming, namely state over *continuous* time.  The 
>> temporally discrete time imposed by the imperative model is pretty 
>> puny in comparison.  Continuous (or "resolution-independent") time has 
>> the same advantages as continuous space: resource-adaptive, scalable, 
>> transformable.
> Yes, that's true, but isn't that also the problem with FRP? I mean, most 
> of the papers I'm reading about (A)FRP indicate that no matter how nice 
> it is to have the continuous time model

I agree with Conal, it's not a continuous time model but a 
resolution-independent time model. The reason it that Arrows (like 
Monads) encapsulate the sequence of transitions. Unless the time is a 
parameter of the transition, it is independent of the time (resolution), 
but still captures its ordered nature.

> to get fine grained control 
> over execution times and resources, one needs to fall back to the 
> discrete delta-time approach?

If you need synchronization, yes.

> And you still need to think about where 
> you have to introduce delays to avoid infinite loops?

I don't see why, unless you want to have a memory or explicitly stop the 
time which means it's a parameter of the transition as mention above 
(but instantaneous transitions seems strange). So, the causality of the 
transitions with a discrete time should not lead to infinite loops. The 
time delay exists de facto.

> Since nobody replied yet on my question about the future of (A)FRP, 
> maybe I can ask it again here? What is the future for FRP? Are other 
> approaches better suitable for reactive applications?

I missed your question, but it's an interesting question. I found very 
interesting and instructive the paper of Hai Liu and Paul Hudak on the 
problem of space leaks in FRP.

a+, ld.