
Hi all - I'm a first-timer here, and am *very* much attracted by Haskell's elegance and power ... :-) I have only poked around briefly with Haskell so far (at the "hello world" level). One thing that I have come across, and which really got me thinking, was the page on the Haskell website about "arrows". They really seem to take elegance and the "generic-ness" of algorithms to a new level. I was thinking - arrows are a relatively recent concept. Haskell's grammar (as defined in the Haskell report) has now been around for quite some time. So - I thought "what if?" What if Haskell were to be defined (er, *re*-defined) in terms of arrows? In other words, what if it were possible to start totally "from scratch", re-defining Haskell's grammar using arrows? (and preferably, *only* arrows ... ). This would presumably involve somehow coding up the arrows first, and then (haivng got them), using them to create/define the rest of the language. My reason for suggesting this - simply to see if it were possible to do a very small (but still quite comprehensive) Haskell implementation. Small meaning maybe 2-3 MB or so ... As an interesting "benchmark" of this, the Rebol language (though proprietary - sigh!) - comes in at 0.5 Mb or so, including a GUI. So, "very small but very powerful" is possible (although undoubtedly pretty difficult ... ) As a Haskell newbie, I have to defer to everyone else on this list (in terms of my Haskell ability), but just thought I'd post this idea anyway. I was thinking " I wonder if anyone has thought of this? ....... " . Arrows seem to be a recent "add-on", as it were, so I thought -given their power and flexibility, why not turn things totally around, and put them at the *very core* of the language, using them to define the language itself. Anyway, I'm keen to hear people's thoughts on this! Very many thanks in advance ... :-) - Andy
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Andy Elvey