[Haskell-cafe] Serialization of (a -> b) and IO a

[Stephen Tetley]

> If not Haskell, are there any languages which provide a simple serialization
> and deserialization of functions?

Napier88 was a persistent language that also had higher-order
functions. I've no experience other than reading about it but as its
persistence was "orthogonal persistence" I'd expect HOFs to be
persistent. The implementation of Napier88 produced a substantial
runtime / persistent store that was used for other languages - I think
one was Persistent Haskell, certainly one was Staple which was a
higher order language.

Tycoon2 was a similar persistent language - it was heavily influenced
by ML so potentially it had HOFs.

PolyML has a persistent store, though this may have been just for the
top-level to freeze bindings I've no idea whether it supported
serializing HOFs.

Clean supports serialized HOFs as does Oz, see the paper below. Kali
Scheme supported migration of running code between networked computers
- as it was a Scheme I'd expect it to be higher order (the migration
would mandate serialization).


http://www-systems.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/wiki/Napier88
http://www.polyml.org/FAQ.html
http://www.st.cs.ru.nl/papers/2003/verm2003-LazyDynamicIO.pdf