[Haskell-cafe] Clearly, Haskell is ill-founded

[Creighton Hogg]

On 7/9/07, Conor McBride <ctm at cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> On 9 Jul 2007, at 06:42, Thomas Conway wrote:
>
> > I don't know if you saw the following linked off /.
> >
> > http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13339/53/
>
> [..]
>
> > The basic claim appears to be that discrete mathematics is a bad
> > foundation for computer science. I suspect the subscribers to this
> > list would beg to disagree.
>
> It's true that some systems are better characterised as corecursive
> "coprograms", rather than as recursive "programs". This is not a
> popular or well-understood distinction. In my career as an advocate
> for total programming (in some carefully delineated fragment of a
> language) I have many times been gotcha'ed thus: "but an operating
> system is a program which isn't supposed to terminate". No, an
> operating system is supposed to remain responsive. And that's what
> total coprograms do.


I'm sorry, but can you expand a little further on this?  I guess I don't
understand how a corecursion => responsive to input but not terminating.
Where does the idea of waiting for input fit into corecursion?
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