On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Brad Larsen
In the next C++ standard, type checking capabilities are being added to templates---"concepts" specify a set of operations a templated type must support. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x#Concepts. Seems somewhat similar to Haskell typeclasses to me, but perhaps the similarity is merely superficial. :-)
A professor of mine, Jeremy Siek, was a major proponent of concepts on the design committee. If I recall correctly, he mentioned Haskell typeclasses as a direct inspiration. Incidentally, Concepts will flaunt more features than typeclasses to CEOs everywhere because C++ does not have inference to worry about (and already has an undecidable compile time, so what would it have to lose?). Luke