[bitc-dev] monads

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

So to summarize: the hard part is laziness. I concur, and I have
absolutely no plans to consider making BitC a lazy language.

Another issue is that we might need to move to rank-2 polymorphism,
which is a jump that I would prefer not to take.

On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 13:59 -0500, James Graves wrote:
> I am not a Haskell expert, but I do have several comments.
> 
> 1) Monads have been added onto other languages.  Particularly functional 
> languages like Ocaml.  So it may be possible to add if later if desired. 
>   Though it can be an advantage getting this in early the programming 
> language lifecycle, so it becomes standard.
> 
> 2) I didn't think the coding style of a typical Haskell program matched 
> the style encouraged by BitC.  I'm talking about stuff like currying, 
> which is commonly used.
> 
> 3) I'd think that translating lazy and pure code to strict would be 
> difficult in many cases.  More like writing completely new code.
> 
> 4) Monads are useful when it comes to analysis of program code, formally 
> or informally.  Their use, especially in Haskell, forces the programmer 
> to directly and explicitly reason about mutable state.  It is "all right 
> there" in terms of seeing who is changing what.  There are no hidden 
> little side effects in an innocuous function named 
> "retrieve_calculated_result", for example.
> 
> James
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