Joachim Durchholz wrote:
I'll move on to the alternatives - Alice ML and/or Clean. Both can serialize without forcing lazy subexpressions.
I don't know about Clean, but with respect to Alice ML this is not correct: Alice ML uniformly blocks on futures upon pickling, including lazy ones. Sometimes you may want to pickle lazy suspensions as such, but more often it is not what you want. In particular, the suspension can easily be larger than its result, and the closure may contain resources which cannot be pickled. If such a suspension was produced by an abstraction you may even argue that making contained resources observable partially breaks the abstraction. To adhere to uniformity, strong abstraction, and the Principle of Least Surprise, we thus chose to force lazy futures in Alice ML.
No FUD, please ;-)
And yes I know there are devils lurking in every language and environment. I'm pretty sure that Haskell has a few others to offer, too. (There's still no good introduction to Monads, for example. One that's understandable for a programmer who knows his Dijkstra well but no category theory. And a few other things.)
No FUD, please ;-) ;-) Cheers, - Andreas