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

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Aug 29, at 4:22, Adrian Hey wrote:
> Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>> On 2008 Aug 28, at 20:45, Adrian Hey wrote:
>>> Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>>>> If Haskell had always taken the pragmatic path of adding what seems
>>>> easiest and most in line with imperative practice it would not be  
>>>> the
>>>> language it is today.  It would be Perl, ML, or Java.
>>>> The Haskell philosophy has always been to stick it out until  
>>>> someone
>>>> comes up with the right solution to a problem rather than picking  
>>>> some
>>>> easy way out.
>>>
>>> BTW, unsafePerformIO seems quite pragmatic and easy to me, so let's
>>> not get too snobby about this. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
>> It's anything but easy; there are specific rules you need to  
>> follow, including use of certain compiler pragmas, to insure it  
>> works properly.
>
> Yes, of course. The worst thing about all this is that the single most
> common use case AFAICS (the one under discussion) isn't even a "safe"
> use. Just pointing out that this pseudo function is certainly not
> something one would expect from an organisation as dedicated to the
> persuit of perfection as Lennart would have us believe. It's an
> expedient hack. Not that I wish to seem ungrateful or anything :-)


...but, as he noted, we *do* that until we find the right way to do it.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH