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

[Stephen Tetley]

But I don't see that you don't need introspection at user level for
persistence, a dynamic type will do, thus the internals aren't open to
inspection. Whatever introspection is necessary can be handled by the
runtime system as in Clean and Persistent Haskell. You could look at
the internals of a pickle with a binary editor but that's perhaps
cheating.

>From my reading of the paper, Persistent Haskell was suitably
referentially transparent:

"This paper describes the first-ever implementation of orthogonal
persistence for a compiled purely functional language, based on an
existing St Andrews persistent object store."

The conclusion notes in passing that OCaml's persistence isn't
referentially transparent. If the Haskell version wasn't, I'd expect a
mea culpa from the authors at this point.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.36.421