[Haskell-cafe] deriving

PR Stanley prstanley at ntlworld.com
Tue Apr 8 09:26:40 EDT 2008


>Hello Hans,
>
>Tuesday, April 8, 2008, 12:17:38 PM, you wrote:
>
> > "deriving" which I think is not used elsewhere. It will break a lot
> > of code, but it is easy to change, and also easy to make a
> > compatibility mode.
>
>it's also easy to replace all the books, update all code repositories
>and reteach all the programmers if you ready to pay for it all :D

I'm sure you could introduce change gradually without too much pain. 
I personally think "deriving" is a descriptive term, now that I 
understand its role better.
I suppose you could consider "specialize" or "instanciate" but both 
those terms are very closely associated with OO and deriving an 
instance of a class with a type isn't quite like instantiation or 
even specialisation. We want a single word which is equivalent  to 
"derives from". Deriving by itself can seem a bit ambiguous at first.

Cheers
Paul 



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list