[Haskell-cafe] Monad.Reader 8: Haskell, the new C++

[Pepe Iborra]

On 13/09/2007, at 0:06, Don Stewart wrote:

> ok:
>> In Monad.Reader 8, Conrad Parker shows how to solve the Instant  
>> Insanity
>> puzzle in the "Haskell" type system.  Along the way he  
>> demonstrates very
>> clearly something that was implicit in Mark Jones' "Type Classes with
>> Functional Dependencies" paper if you read it very very carefully  
>> (which
>> I hadn't, but on re-reading it is there).  That is, Haskell types  
>> plus
>> multiparameter type classes plus functional dependencies is a logic
>> programming language.  In fact it is a sufficiently powerful  
>> language to
>> emulate any Turing machine calculation as a type checking problem.
>>
>> So we have
>>
>> 	C++ : imperative language whose type system is a Turing-complete
>> 	      functional language (with rather twisted syntax)
>>
>> 	Haskell: functional language whose type system is a Turing-
>> 	      complete logic programming language (with rather twisted
>> 	      syntax)
>>
>> Since not all Turing machines halt, and since the halting problem is
>> undecidable, this means not only that some Haskell programs will make
>> the type checker loop forever, but that there is no possible meta-
>> checker that could warn us when that would happen.
>>
>> I've been told that functional dependencies are old hat and there is
>> now something better.  I suspect that "better" here means "worse".
>
> Better here means "better" -- a functional language on the type  
> system,
> to type a functional language on the value level.
>
> -- Don

For a taste, see Instant Insanity transliterated in this functional  
language:

http://hpaste.org/2689

NB: it took me 5 minutes, and that was my first piece of coding ever  
with Type families