It strikes me that this question may be related (perhaps distantly) to
Godel's incompleteness theorem. Anyone else see similarities here?
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Johannes Waldmann
Dear all,
It's not exactly Haskell-specific, but ... I am trying to track down the origin of the proverb
"the existence (or: need for) a preprocessor shows omissions in (the design of) a language."
I like to think that in Haskell, we don't need preprocessors since we can manipulate programs programmatically, because they are data.
In other words, a preprocessor realizes higher order functions, and you only need this if your base language is first-order.
Yes, that's vastly simplified, and it does not cover all cases, what about generic programming (but this can be done via Data.Data) and alex/happy (but we have parsec) etc etc.
Best regards, J.W.
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