[Fwd: F#]

Paul Hudak paul.hudak@yale.edu
Thu, 30 May 2002 13:04:16 -0400


Hi Don --

Thanks for all the informative stuff regarding FP implementations on
.NET.  However I am a little surprised by one thing you say:

> ... But the only truly serious complications added by .NET
> itself are (a) the general problem of Haskell interop with imperative
> libraries, requiring you to reach for monads quite often (or to wrap
> the libraries yourself) and (b) ...
>
> IMHO problem (a) will always be the thing that stops Haskell becoming
> very very big.  But then being non-imperative it's also its main
> selling point...

Are you saying that Haskell users would reject this?  (to which I would
disagree, since that's what we would expect)  Or new users?  (to which I
would say that the jury is out)

I would think that the biggest impediment to Haskell.NET would be
efficiency, in both the generated code (primarily because of lazy
evaluation) and in compile time (at least with an optimizing compiler
such as GHC).

  -Paul