[Haskell-cafe] Non-recursive let [Was: GHC bug? Let with guards loops]

[J. Stutterheim]

The IDE still works for Windows, but it isn't actively developed anymore (though bugs and minor annoyances are still being fixed). For Mac and Linux we now have a command line tool that uses the IDE's codebase. Personally, I just use vim (of course you can use any editor you prefer; vim comes with syntax colouring for Clean out of the box) for coding and then use a new CLI tool called CPM (Clean Project Manager) to build my project. This tool will be included by default with the next Clean release. I doubt the IDE will be resurrected on Mac and Linux, because it is just too much work to port Object IO (the GUI library) to those platforms and our own Mac/Linux users strongly prefer their own editors over the IDE anyway. For people that prefer a non-CLI workflow, we are actually looking into making a web-based IDE in iTasks (although it doesn't have a very high priority at the moment).

The OS dependency for dynamics stems from the fact that the Clean dynamics are quite a bit more powerful than Haskell's. For example, using dynamics, it is possible to send arbitrary functions to another Clean application, which can then dynamically link these functions in at runtime and immediately execute them. It doesn't even need to be the same program, which Cloud Haskell does require (and theoretically, it can even be another OS). This advanced dynamic linking feature requires intimate knowledge of the target OS' binary representation. (I would actually really like to see Haskell's dynamics system to become as powerful as Clean's; it also supports polymorphism, for example)

On Jul 15, 2013, at 04:31 AM, "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:


On 13/07/2013, at 11:27 PM, J. Stutterheim wrote:
- they then abandoned the Macintosh world for
Windows. The Mac IDE was killed off; there is
now an IDE for Windows but not MacOS or Linux.
The good news is that the latest version of Clean[2] and its code generator[3] now works fine again on 64 bit Mac OS X

Is that still the command-line tools, or has the IDE been resurrected?

- other major features remain Windows-only
The bad news is that this is true to some extend; the dynamics system is still largely Windows-only. However, this is the only language feature I can think of that really is Windows-only.

I have never been able to understand why there should be ANY
OS-dependency in the dynamics feature.

- the available books about Clean are way out of
date, several drafts of other books remain
incomplete.
- the documentation (like the Report) has always been
rather amateurish and incomplete. Certainly
compared with the Haskell documentation.
An iTasks book is actually in the works, which will contain a fair bit of Clean (although it is not a dedicated Clean book). There are also concrete plans to update the language manual soon-ish.

Not to be offensive, because after saying "Denk U" I have no more
Dutch words I can use, but it would really pay to find a native
speaker of English to give the manual a final polish.
- there is nothing to compare with the Haskell Platform.
Actually, yes there is[4].

A misundertanding. "Nothing to compare with" is idiomatic for
"nothing of comparable size to". Yes, you _can_ compare the
Clean Platform with the Haskell Platform; it's a lot smaller.

It can be described as a mix between Haskell Platform and a mini Hackage-like repository. There is no such thing as a Clean alternative to cabal install, though.
Keep in mind that there is only a handful of people working on Clean, while Haskell has a huge community in comparison.

Haskell has always benefited from
- openness
- multiple implementations
- documentation

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