[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

[Edsko de Vries]

On 4 Nov 2009, at 13:36, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

> Artyom.
>
> I know what uniqueness means. What I meant is that the context in  
> which uniqueness is used, for imperative sequences:
>
> (y, s')= proc1 s x
> (z, s'')= proc2 s' y
> .....
>
> is essentially the same sequence as if we rewrite an state monad to  
> make the state  explicit. When the state is the "world" state, then  
> it is similar to the IO monad.

Yes, as long as there is a single thing that is being updated there's  
little difference between the state monad and a unique type. But  
uniqueness typing is more general. For instance, a function which  
updates two arrays

f (arr1, arr2) = (update arr1 0 'x', update arr2 0 'y')

is easily written in functional style in Clean, whereas in Haskell we  
need to sequentialize the two updates:

f (arr1, arr2)
   = do writeArray arr1 0 'x'
            writeArray arr2 0 'y'

You can find a more detailed comparison in my thesis (https://www.cs.tcd.ie/Edsko.de.Vries/pub/MakingUniquenessTypingLessUnique-screen.pdf 
, Section 2.8.7).

-Edsko