Hi everybody, What is the situation with respect to reification of function/thunks in Haskell? Does any current implementation support it ? And, is there any plan for GHC to support it? Claus's comments on this, follow. titto On Monday 18 June 2007 23:45:23 Claus Reinke wrote:
Is there any fundamental reasons why Haskell functions/closures cannot be serialised?
no, and that is part of the problem: the language would need to be extended, but the academically interesting issues have been tackled, all that is left is a lot of work (that is why these things would be so valuable: complex implementation machinery, controlled by very small language extensions, sometimes even language simplifications, such as lifting existing restrictions on i/o), preferably with very good planning, so that all the work does not become useless right after it is finished. there isn't much hope that this issue is going to be settled via the usual academic funding sources.
Most languages, even Java, have a reflection capability to dynamically inspect an object. It is surprising that Haskell doesn't offer it.
it has to be done with care, or it will invalidate *all* your nice reasoning about haskell programs. random example
reify (f . g) == [| f . g |] =/= [| \x-> f (g x) |] == reify (\x-> f (g x))
reification is not a referentially transparent program context.