Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> #25. "It pays attention to details." I can't even determine what the 
> hell he's talking about here...

I can give you examples of what "paying attention to details" means. Dunn
o 
if it's the sort of thing this guy's talking about, but...

Remember a decade ago, when people were making scripting languages 
implemented in C?  Lots of those languages had strings that were, 
internally, null-terminated. But since they were also GCed, you didn't ge
t 
the memcpy/memset sorts of functions, only the strcpy sorts of functions,
 so 
you couldn't actually work with binary data in a string.

And then they'd have stuff where a string literal starting with a zero is
 
octal. And someone would read a string from a form or the keyboard or 
whatever that's supposed to be a postal (zip) code, and the user would ty
pe 
09375, and the program would barf, because 9 isn't a valid octal digit. 
Using a leading 0 to always mean "octal" only works if you have source co
de 
compiled separately from the user input.

Working around this sort of lamebrainness is necessary if the language 
designers don't pay attention to detail. (These are both examples from Tc
l, 
incidentally. :-)



> "To get a sense for how wildly amazing Haskell-related technology, chec
k 
> out Automatic generation of free theorems — a tool that, given 
a 
> function’s type signature, can *write a function for you that h
as the 
> correct signature!* You won’t find this kind of thing anywhere 
else."

Aren't there lots of functions that have the same signature?  I mean, wha
t's 
it going to write for
   f :: [a] -> (a -> Bool) -> [a]

> - We didn't invent algebraic datatypes. Those existed for decades befor
e 
> us. (Although they're fairly rare in real programming languages.)

Do you actually have algebraic datatypes in Haskell? Kewl.

> - There's no IDE for Haskell, but "I don't think an IDE is really 
> necessary". Well *sure* you don't. Because you haven't got one yet! :-P


Heh. Funny how that works, isn't it?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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