Erik Meijer wrote:
Nope, I also think that Haskell is the world's finest *imperative* language (and the world's best functional language as well). The beauty of monads is that you can encapsulate imperative actions as first class values, ie they have the same status as functions, lists, ... Not many other imperative languages have statements as first class citizens.
It may be the only imperative language that doesn't have mutable variables as a standard part of the language. :-) I do agree that Haskell has a lot of nice imperative features, but it is also missing a few that are fundamental to imperative programming. Personally, I'd love to see a language that is imperative from the ground up, that has some of the design features of Haskell (especially the type system), but I don't think that Haskell is that language (yet?). A question for the list: Is there a book that gives a good introduction to Hindley-Milner typing theory and practice, and that delves into its various extensions (e.g. imperative programs, type classes, record types). I have Mitchell's book out from the library, but it seems a bit limited with respect to extentions (I think it deals with subtypes, but not type classes and mutable variables, for example). Cheers, Theodore Norvell ---------------------------- Dr. Theodore Norvell theo@engr.mun.ca Electrical and Computer Engineering http://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo Engineering and Applied Science Phone: (709) 737-8962 Memorial University of Newfoundland Fax: (709) 737-4042 St. John's, NF, Canada, A1B 3X5