On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 09:44:11PM -0500, Galchin Vasili wrote:
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your generous response. " By the way, you don't want to use typeclasses here; they solve the problem of having more than one possible interface at runtime, whereas you only care about compile-time" .. in reality I do care about decisions made at run-time (this just struck me as I am writing). I am trying to avoid "ifdef's" and have all decisions made at run-time (maybe given the nature of Haskell .. i..e static/compile-time type checking this is impossible) ...
I don't see how in any language you could introduce working run-time-determined os-specific code. How would you link with the windows libraries under linux, and vice versa? And moreover, why would you do so? Unless you're talking about running under an interpreter, I don't see how you'd construct a binary that would be able to run under both windows and linux.
... Trust me as i said in a previous post I am not a big fan of C++. I guess we are talking about strong type checking .. but static vs dynamic .. in the case of C++ it is a mixture, e.g. when a C++ class's member function is not "virtual" then "call resolution" is done at compile-time vs "virtual" when it is done at run-time via the virtual function table. Everybody ... by no means am I a booster of C++ .. i.e. "done it, seen it ...". Maybe a previous "poster" addressed my concerns. In discussing this OS Abstraction Layer, I think I am thinking of some notion of "laziness" (read ... decisions made at run-time .. not compile-time .. otherwise I think we have to resort to ifdefs which are not so nice and require a lot of code maintenance.)