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

[Adrian Hey]

Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Adrian Hey wrote:
> 
>> There's no semantic difficulty with the proposed language extension,
> 
> How does it behave in the presence of dynamic loading?

To answer this you need to be precise about the semantics of what
is being dynamically loaded. But this is too complex an issue
for me to get in to right now. Actually as far as things like
hs-plugins are concerned I'd alway meant one day what exactly
a "plugin" is, semantically. But as I've never had cause to use
them so never got round to it. Like is it a value, or does it
have state and identity or what?

> What about remote procedure calls?

Dunno, what problem do you anticipate?

> Also what if I want a thread-local variable?

Well actually I would say that threads are bad concurrency model so
I'm not keen on thread local state at all. Mainly because I'd like to
get rid of threads, but also a few other doubts even if we keep
threads.

Yes, I'm no big fan of the IO monad (or any other monad in fact) and
IORefs and all that (all smacks of putting a purely function veneer on
good ol fashioned procedural programming to me). But we are where we are
and this isn't going to change any time soon. Just trying to fix what
seem like obvious problems with Haskells current IO without doing
anything too radical and unproven. (I.E. Just making existing practice
*safe*, at least in the sense that the compiler ain't gonna fcuk it up
with INLINING or CSE and every one understands what is and isn't safe
in ACIO)

Regards
--
Adrian Hey