I permitted myself to protest (veeery mildly) against some very strict
statements concerning a non-strict language, of S. Marlow and
P.E. Martinez Lopez:
> In fact, there's no way to perform an IO computation in Haskell
> other than binding it to a value called 'Main.main', compiling
> and running it.
> ... you have NO means to produce that execution other that binding
> your IO to Main.main.
==
I have shown an utterly silly script in Hugs, which used
readfile f >>= putStr, and I got from Simon Marlow:
> Well, pedantically speaking that's not a program (see Section 5 of
> the H98 report).
> Simon
Oh, thank you. (I will reread the remaining sections as well.)
But, if you permit -
- with this kind of pedantic reasoning I might have (if I were
malicious,
which is not the case) said:
"There is no way to do ANYTHING even *without* IO, without writing
a program containing Main, because it will not execute...
(And you don't even need Haskell, this is true in "C" as well).
(And I remind you that in your incriminated statement you did not
say anything about "Haskell program", but "in Haskell".) But please,
let's stop discussing formulations.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France
