Ton, Henrick,

| The importance of Haskell is [...] the emphasis it puts on the | manner in which the total function is decomposed. [...]

Would the picture be less gloomy if you said "the emphasis I put on..." rather than "the emphasis [Haskell] puts on..."?

At first reading, I would have said no, but I get your point. As long as pure sub-Haskell exists, I can still write pure code.

I think most Haskeller's, agree with you: we would like to strive for uniformity. But how does one get there, how does one agree on agreeing? A large part of the answer, I think, is through experiments, i.e. experimental language features, [...] And in order to find *good* answers to such questions, one needs to make use of these features in pretty serious projects, which in turn implies that there has to be a reasonable way of enabling and disabling them. And command line arguments just isn't a very good way of doing that in practice.

You've both made good points, which I accept. Although I remain wary of these things becoming too much a part of the pragmatic usage and getting locked in as standard behaviour for applications. But, you've convinced me that goal of concptualy pure pragmatic programming is still a feature of the group. Wiping nose on sleeve, I withdraw to write some more geometric software. Regards, Bruce.