syntax...(strings/interpolation/here docs)

[Ian Zimmerman]

Mark> Ultimately, it comes down to a question of what you're trying to
Mark> achieve.  Do you envisage Haskell as an elegant scripting
Mark> language that competes with perl and ruby for quick but useful
Mark> hacks?  Or do you think it might better serve as a platform for
Mark> writing significant user level applications with fancy user
Mark> interfaces and international appeal?

Neither.

The chief advantage of functional languages is supposed to be their
clean semantics with straightforward formalization, which allows one
to be confident in the correctness of relatively large and complex
bodies of code.  That advantage is forfeited when trying to interface
directly to messy GUI toolkits (and _all_ GUI toolkits in existence
are messy).

Significant applications, yes; but only the _back-ends_ of such
applications.

-- 
Ian Zimmerman, Oakland, California, U.S.A.
GPG: 433BA087  9C0F 194F 203A 63F7 B1B8  6E5A 8CA3 27DB 433B A087
The world has taken on a thickness of vulgarity that raises
a spiritual man's contempt to the violence of a passion.  Baudelaire