[Haskell-cafe] Type system

[ajb at spamcop.net]

G'day all.

Quoting Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:

> And yet they commonly pop up in Haskell. Can anybody put their finger
> on precisely why that is?

One of the reasons why advanced type hackery shows up a lot in Haskell
is that Haskell has never taken the easy way out.

When confronted with an issue that doesn't seem to fit with purity,
Haskell's answer has always been to apply more research, raid more
category theory or generally think hard about the problem and come up
with a clean solution, rather than sell out to impurity.

And almost always, the theoretically clean solution has opened up new
uses for types that were not previously considered.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage