Re: Will Haskell be commercialized in the future?

At 2000-11-27 19:52, Tyson Dowd wrote:

On 27-Nov-2000, Adrian Hey wrote:

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On Mon 27 Nov, Fergus Henderson wrote:

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Do you think that Haskell would be better without `unsafePerformIO'?

Well, a sceptic like me is bound to wonder why such a non-function is provided in a purely functional language. What really worries me is that the damage isn't localised. If you allow such things you can never be sure that any function really is a function, without careful scrutiny of all the code it's dependent on.

This is an issue, but it arises in any "pure" language with a foreign language interface.

Not necessarily, the functions just need to be typed correctly. In the case of a non-safe or imperative function, that's going to be of the form "a -> IO b" (or "IO a -> IO b" if you prefer the more powerful arrow model). No safety needs to be sacrificed. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA