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

[Adrian Hey]

Johannes Waldmann wrote:
> Adrian Hey wrote:
> 
>> There are plenty situations where it makes no semantic sense to allow
>> 2 or more or some "thing". A list of all active processes for example.
> 
> "all" referring to what scope? perhaps there occurs a situation
> with several process (thread) pools, severals cores etc.

Seeing as we're talking about an OS kernel I guess the scope would
be all processes active on the (possibly virtual) machine being
managed by the OS.

But it really doesn't matter what the scope is. "All" is the key
word here.

> See also "singleton considered harmful", there are similar arguments:
> http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/23417

Following the arguments made against the singleton pattern over the
years leads me to conclude there are 2 distinct camps.

Applications programmers who consider it bad because it's way of
making "global variables" and we all know how bad they are, right?
Typically these folk appear to have no clue about how the underlying
IO library, "framework" and OS infrastructure they are dependent on
*actually works*.

System programmers who recognise the need for singletons but regard
being forced to use the singleton pattern hack as language design
defect.

The situation seems similar with us. The unsafePerformIO hack is
just terrible (especially for a language like Haskell), but why
is it being used so often? Is it incompetance of library writers
or a language design defect?

Regards
--
Adrian Hey