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

[Thomas Conway]

On 9/14/07, Thomas Schilling <nominolo at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The type system doesn't help you avoid writing non-terminating programs,
> so i see no problem with it being possible giving programmers the power
> to express and check more complex properties of their programs -- as
> long as type-checking remains sound.  From a practical standpoint,
> non-terminating type checks are just as much a bug as non-terminating
> library functions.  Type systems need more thought anyways, so why not
> make sure it's terminating, too?  The other extreme is to use dependent
> types everywhere, but this has a bit more drastic consequences to the
> accessibility and practicality of the language.

While I love all the exceedingly cool type hackery, I also like the
compiler to terminate.

Some people in this forum may be old enough to remember Turbo Prolog.
It did mode inference (i.e. data-flow analysis) on programs, but
unfortunately it didn't always terminate. So what you got was a hung
compiler, leaving you to guess what it was about your [quite possibly
correct] program that caused the analysis to loop.

With C++ templates, the problem is addressed by having a limit to the
depth of the "call stack" for template evaluation. I recall with Forte
5, there was no flag to let you increase  the depth, so at one point
we had to do something like

    if (0) {
          // Horrible nasty expression to force the evaluation of some of the
         // the lower parts of the template stack
    }

This works because (at least in Forte 5, and probably most
implementations) template instantiations are hash-consed.

I would *much* rather have a simpler type system, than a compiler
which might not terminate.

cheers,
T.
-- 
Thomas Conway
drtomc at gmail.com

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.