At 2002-02-19 20:50, Eray Ozkural wrote: >> It's ugly, and isn't part of the spirit of the language. > >The above statement cannot be a basis for any argument against Bernard's >proposal.
It's an aesthetic argument that hopes for an aesthetic consensus among Haskell users (which may or may not exist). ... >Since you are defining the spirit of the language, Oh no, spirit cannot be defined, only suggested. ... >A general concept such as reflection cannot be deemed as worthless in >itself. It might reasonably be considered inappropriate to Haskell. Reflection may be useful for debugging, so I would not call it worthless. I consider reflection such as Generics to be in more or less the same aesthetic category as unsafe IO functions -- something to be generally avoided but perhaps useful in certain limited contexts such as debugging. I don't use Generics or unsafe-anything in my Haskell software. I _do_ occasionally use the 'deriving' construct, which is strictly speaking reflection though I think a relatively harmless form. What I would hate to see is widespread use of reflection in general programs. It rather seems to miss the point of Haskell's type system. >Any system that has a tiny bit of introspective powers can be said to be >reflective to some extent, for instance a Haskell interpreter. That's fine, but I don't include a Haskell interpreter in my compiled Haskell programs. And I don't want other people peeking inside my types at run-time. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
