[Haskell-cafe] Re: Microsoft's Singularity Project and Haskell

Henning Thielemann schlepptop at henning-thielemann.de
Mon Aug 2 15:11:47 EDT 2010


David Leimbach schrieb:
> Haskell's great and all but it does have a few warts when it comes to
> how much real trust one  should put into the type system.
> 
> Some compromises still exist like unsafePerformIO that you can't detect
> simply by looking at the types of functions.
> 
> In order to live up to the hype and the marketing around Haskell, really
> things like unsafePerformIO should not be allowed at all.

I also do not like the ubiquitous use of unsafePerformIO. However I
acknowledge that it allows us to implement things in Haskell that would
otherwise need a language and compiler extension, e.g. ByteStrings or ST
monad. In the Modula-3 Language Report the section about unsafe features
is introduced with the quote:
  "There are some cases that no law can be framed to cover." (Aristotle)

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/m3/reference/unsafe.html



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