[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Top Level <-

[Lennart Augustsson]

BTW, I'm not contradicting that the use of global variables can be
necessary when interfacing with legacy code, I just don't think it's
the right design when doing something new.

  -- Lennart

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Adrian Hey <ahey at iee.org> wrote:
> Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>>
>> Making a network stack from peek and poke is easy in a well structured OS.
>> The boot loader (or whatever) hands you the capability (call it
>> something else if you want) to do raw hardware access, and you build
>> from there.  If you look at well structured OSs like NetBSD, this is
>> pretty much how they work.  No hardware drivers use global variables.
>
> So? We all know this is possible outside Haskell. But I don't want to
> rely on mysterious black box OS's to "hand me the capability" any
> more than I want to rely on mysterious extant but unimplementable libs
> like Data.Unique. Most real world computing infrastructure uses no OS at
> all. How could I use Haskell to implement such systems?
>
> Also (to mis-quote Linus Torvalds) could you or anyone else who agrees
> with you please SHOW ME THE CODE in *Haskell*! If scripture is all
> that's on offer I'm just not going to take any of you seriously.
>
> Frankly I'm tired of the patronising lectures that always acompany these
> threads. It'd be good if someone who "knows" global variables are evil
> could put their code where their mouth is for a change. Fixing up
> the base libs to eliminate the dozen or so uses of the "unsafePerformIO
> hack" might be a good place to start. I'll even let you change the API
> of these libs if you must, provided you can give a sensible explanation
> why the revised API is better, safer, more convenient or whatever.
>
> Regards
> --
> Adrian Hey
>
>
>
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