On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 10:05:40PM +0100, Pasqualino 'Titto' Assini wrote:
Most languages, even Java, have a reflection capability to dynamically inspect an object.
_Even_ Java? That's a strange point of view considering how much money went into this technology. I also find it hard to believe that most languages have reflection, especially those which are traditionally focused on efficiency and compilation to native code, like C, C++, Fortran, Pascal, etc. How many languages with reflection can you list?
It is surprising that Haskell doesn't offer it.
It is surprising that it is surprising to you :-) I think the reasons are mostly insufficient resources and not enough interest to justify the effort. I think an interesting lesson about this comes from the effort that went into Template Haskell (which, BTW, offers some kind of compile time reflection) - this was probably very hard to design and implement, but my impression is that it's not widely used, despite being "cool" and useful. Best regards Tomek