On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 15:46:56 -0500 "David Bergman" <davidb@home.se> wrote:
Vincenzo,
I agree with your feeling of the expressive superiority of functional programming compared to C and even C++, although I would not use the word "hell" ;-)
Just because you are not using wxwin and PREPROCESSOR BASED MESSAGE PASSING! :PPP I hope there are no wxwin developers on this list, but if there are, really, please understand me :) Note that I consider wxwin itself really good (it's worth using it if you get a program that works on macos, windows and linux with 0.1 effort), but there are things in C++ that are not so good at all. besides, OO programming brings too much syntax and too few semantics in my opinion (consider the syntactical mess of deriving a class just to get a different behaviour in response to an event, compared to an expression of type "IO a"), but I am compelled to use C++ this time so I call that "hell".
The reason that I bring this up is because I have implemented a Haskell Prelude-like library for me and my development team in those "hellish" cases where we need to express our ideas in C++, in that way promoting the "declarative, abstract and typed" thought patterns to the regular developer.
Thanks, maybe my real troubles come from the fact that I am now used to haskell and ocaml, and not from C++ in itself. Vincenzo