
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 5:11 PM, Don Stewart
brad.larsen:
John,
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 3:20 PM, John A. De Goes
wrote: [...] JVM is cross-platform, and contains sufficient typing information to permit one to write something like, "import foreign jvm java.list.Collection", and have typed access to the whole class and all of its methods. [...]
Having painless Haskell <- Java interoperability would be great. I'm curious though: could it really be so simple as a one-line ``import foreign jvm'' directive? I imagine the purity mismatch between Haskell and Java would be very troublesome.
No more so than C, surely. We're used to stateful APIs. They're a pain. [...]
The use of foreign C libraries in Haskell is typically done through definition of lots of boilerplate code, putting a safe, workable Haskell veneer over the library. Right? I got the impression (perhaps wrongly) that John was suggesting a simple one-line ``import foreign jvm LIBRARY'' directive to let you use LIBRARY without writing all that boilerplate. Which would be very convenient, but is rather different than the situation with C libraries. Sincerely, Brad