On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 09:27:32AM +0100, Tillmann Rendel wrote:
Andrew Sackville-West schrieb:
this raises a question for me, being a bit of a schemer. Is there any parallel in haskell to the data is code model of the lisp family?
No.
My initial impression is no, that you'd have to parse it as an expression and evaluate it as you would in regular imperative languages. I'd love to hear otherwise.
I don't see how "code is data" is connected to imperative vs. purely functional. After all, lisp & co. are not purely functional, but feature "code is data". Another well-known symbolic language, which allows to treat code as data and vice versa, is prolog.
I didn't mean to connect the concept to imperative vs. functional.
Since Haskell features algebraic data types, and a reasonable flexible syntax, you do not need to do any parsing. Instead, you can write down the AST of the embedded language directly as part of your Haskell program. But you have to write an evaluator. With pattern matching, that is often very easy, though.
looks like I'm off to read about Template Haskell. thanks to all. A