[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why is Haskell not homoiconic?

[Jón Fairbairn]

"Henning Sato von Rosen" <henning.von.rosen at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all!
> 
> I am curious as to why Haskell not is homoiconic?

It very nearly is. The icon for Haskell is a lower-case
lambda, but the logo for these folk
http://www.ualberta.ca/~cbidwell/cmb/lambda.htm is an
upper-case lambda.

> Homiconic means that "the primary representation of programs is also a
> data structure in a primitive type of the language itself"

Oh, dear, that renders my remark above irrelevant ;-0

The main reason is that Haskell is designed as a compiled
language, so the source of the programme can safely
disappear at runtime.  So there's no need to have a
representation of it beyond the source code. 

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk