[Haskell-cafe] Why purely in haskell?

[Anton van Straaten]

Don Stewart wrote:
> anton:
>> OTOH, the freedom to change things on the fly can be nice to have, and 
>> if used with "great responsibility" (mainly an understanding of what's 
>> safe to do and what isn't), the downside can be vanishingly small.
> 
> It can be small, unless you need to have any kind of static assurance
> (say for high assurance software, or for new kinds of optimisations, or
> if you want to reorder code in the compiler for parallelism).
> 
> Then the downside to arbitrary, untracked effects in the system is huge.

Oh dear - I'm going to have to rethink the paper I was working on, 
provisionally titled "In defense of arbitrary untracked effects in high 
assurance software."  ;)

But by "can be vanishingly small", I definitely meant something like "in 
cases where it's technically and economically appropriate".

Anton