Priorities

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 01:05:57PM +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> Personally, I'm not sure about caseless underscore, concurrency, natural
> numbers and parallel list comprehensions.

There is one more reason to leave concurrency out of the standard.

Some experts (like Hans Boehm) argue, that concurrency can't be added to
the language as a library.
    http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

This is true for many imperative programming languages. Haskell seems
to be an exception:
    http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2005-December/009417.html

We don't have any problems with ensuring good cooperation between
mutable variables and concurrency synchronisation primitives, because
the language doesn't have mutable variables, they are delivered in
the concurrency library - the variables _are_ the synchronisation
primitives.

If we add concurrency to the standard, we'll be in a strange situation.
In future discussions about language design and concurrency, all we will
be able to say to highlight Haskell's strengths will be something like
this:
    The design of Haskell was so great, that we could add concurrency as
    a library without introducing any problems... but we have
    concurrency in the standard anyway...

;-)

Best regards
Tomasz

-- 
I am searching for programmers who are good at least in
(Haskell || ML) && (Linux || FreeBSD || math)
for work in Warsaw, Poland