Hi Robin, On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 16:13, Robin Green wrote:
Suppose you have the requirement that a certain feature of your software be disable-able at compile time, to avoid having to pull in certain dependencies (which may not be available on all platforms). Disabling a feature may entail removing certain fields from certain constructors (again, to avoid pulling in certain dependencies), and/or removing certain functions from certain modules. What is the best way to do this in Haskell?
I don't know, but... This problem description suggests that perhaps insights from
Aspect-Oriented Programming and/or Software Product Lines may be relevant. However, I haven't heard of much work that relates these concepts to Haskell. Maybe this would be a good topic for an enterprising student?
I would love to see Haskell SPLs developed with feature-oriented programming concepts [1,2]. Only it would be much better if compositions were type-safe. I don't want aspects as they are presented in AspectJ (i.e. dynamic, hazardous). But everybody has their own definition of aspect these days. Regards, Sean [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_Oriented_Programming [2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/schwartz/search.cgi