Re: Import / Export

[Kevin Hammond <kh@cs.glasgow.ac.uk>]

From: Kevin Hammond <kh@cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
To: haskell@cs.glasgow.ac.uk
Subject: Re:  Import / Export
Original-Sender: Paul Kelly <phjk@doc.ic.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 90 11:45:38 BST
Sender: haskell-request@cs.glasgow.ac.uk

Just a thought: doesn't having multiple names for a constructor compromise
the language's confluency?  I guess the compromise is benign, but it seems
pretty nasty to me.  My point really is that if Haskell is to have non-
referentially transparent features, it should be by a considered design 
process rather than by accident.

Perhaps the designers of the language could assemble a short set of principles
for equational reasoning in Haskell.  I, for one, do not subscribe to the view
that a language is easy to reason about just because it can be translated into 
the lambda calculus.

Given such a set of principles, we could attempt to determine whether they are
actually justified by the semantics.  My goal, of course, is to define the
language by such rules without recourse to denotational semantics.

Yours,
	Paul Kelly
 
 Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK
 (telephone (+44 71) 589 5111 extension 5028)