<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > > [protocol adaptation]); it's the state of _templates_ in Haskell, > > specifically, which I was rather dubious about (it may be that I just > > haven't dug into them deep enough yet, but they do seem not a little > > "convoluted" to me, so far). > > > Yup, the templates is an afterthought and the point of discussion by > Lispers(?) too. I have no idea what it is intended for, there must be > some need for it but definitely beyond what I can handle.
I believe that the basic idea is to make available a powerful "compile time language" in parallel to the "runtime language" -- so in a sense the motivation is related to that for macros in Lisp, at least if I grok it correctly... but with more anchoring in the typesystem rather than in syntactic aspects of the base language. As it turns out that C++'s templates also make up a Turing-complete compile-time language anchored in the (admittedly weaker/less elegant) typesystem of the base language, it's not all that different "philosophically" (if my understanding is correct). I gather that the next C++ standard will have "concepts" (in the generic programming sense of the word) as a first-class construct, rather than just as an abstraction to help you think of templates, so it may be that the current distinctions will blur even further... Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
