On 2006-12-16 13:58:37 -0500, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Why do you think that uniform syntax is necessary to provide new paradigms > when it is equivalent to infix syntax?
Because it doesn't require one to write a parser for each new syntax for each new paradigm. > In what way is Haskell's support for imperative programming limited? It requires one to frame everything in functional terms or to jump through the hoop of monads. > Can you give an example of a Lisp macro that does something useful that you > can't do in these other languages? It isn't a question of "can't do in these other languages," it's a matter of "can't do as easily in these other languages." Look at kenny tilton's cells. Its a dataflow paradigm built largely of macros. It goes completely against the semantics of haskell - cells is all about the eager evaluation of side effecting state mutation. Could you do it in haskell? Yes, in the greenspun/turing-completeness sense, but not nearly as easily as in common lisp, because the very paradigm - eager evaluation combined with side effecting state mutation - goes against the basic semantics of haskell. You'd have to jump through extra hoops to build a system whose very nature contradicts two of the semantic foundations of haskell - laziness and absense of side effects. Then there's the issue of the new syntax. Easy to build in lisp without learning another language - lisp macros use lisp. What little I've seen of caml4p looks like perlesque line noise. Ultimately I think that the defaults of both haskell and ocaml - functional, static typing, non-uniform syntax - are things I don't want as defaults, but as options for later in the development of only certain pieces of code. I don't want to be required to jump through the pure-functional, must-use-monads-for-any-side-effects, static-type, non-uniform-syntax hoops to express my ideas. It makes me less flexible in dealing with individual parts of a program differently. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
