"Jose Balado" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I have a question: I understand, after reading the AliceFaq, why you > didn't choose Oz as a basis for Alice but, is there any reason for Alice > to be based on SML rather than on other functional languages like > Haskell for example?
SML is comparably simple and has a particularly clean and orthogonal semantics, guided by a complete formal specification. That makes it a perfect target for doing language design experiments and research. Also, its module system was a good basis for the open programming approach we had in mind. OCaml was another choice we considered, but it's too big a language, and has a number of rather dark corners in its semantics. Haskell is a language I like a lot as well, but for our purposes it wasn't well suited. In particular, its module system is rudimentary, and type classes in their current form don't go well with modularization at all (all instances are essentially global). It's not clear how to incorporate dynamic linking and module import with it. Also, a default lazy semantics isn't a good match for our approach to concurrency based on futures. And probably for constraint programming neither. - Andreas _______________________________________________ alice-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/mailman/listinfo/alice-users
