Cristian Baboi wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_object
The term was coined by Christopher Strachey in the context of “functions
as first-class citizens” in the mid-1960's.[1]
Depending on the language, this can imply:
1. being expressible as an anonymous literal value
2. being storable in variables
3. being storable in data structures
4. having an intrinsic identity (independent of any given name)
5. being comparable for equality with other entities
6. being passable as a parameter to a procedure/function
7. being returnable as the result of a procedure/function
8. being constructable at runtime
9. being printable
10. being readable
11. being transmissible among distributed processes
12. being storable outside running processes
I'll guess that 5,9,12 does not apply to Haskell functions.
Exactly, together with 10 and 11 (when the distributed processes are on
different machines).
But there is good reason that those things can't be done in Haskell.
With extensional equality (two functions are considered equal if they
yield the same result on every possible argument) number 5 is
undecidable. Similarly, there cannot be functions
print :: (Int -> Int) -> String
compile :: String -> (Int -> Int)
with
compile . print = id
A print function based on an intensional representation (assembly,
byte code, etc.) would have to distinguish extensionally equal functions
print f ≠ print g although f = g
which is not allowed.
More importantly, I don't quite understand your question. If you
definitively need 9-12 for a practical problem at hand, then you may
want to take a look at the functional language Clean
http://clean.cs.ru.nl/
which is similar to Haskell but offers 9-12 in some form.
In all other cases, an email thread is not a good (often not even
successful) way to get a coherent "world view" on Haskell (or on
something else) since this necessarily involves nitpicking
philosophical questions. In my experience, interrogating one person in
real-time in audio and "interrogating" books are the best ways to do
that. Concerning books, maybe
The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming
http://www.cwi.nl/~jve/HR
is for you. More books on
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books
You don't have to buy them, borrow them from a library.
Regards,
apfelmus
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