From: D.Wakeling@exeter.ac.uk Date: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 17:18:23 +0100 Message-Id: <2187.199508031618@olib> To: jmattson@hpclopt.cup.hp.com, andy@dcs.gla.ac.uk, andre@dcs.gla.ac.uk, simonm@dcs.gla.ac.uk, sansom@dcs.gla.ac.uk [snip -- Will] I don't work on functional programming as much as I used to, but I do have a proposal for a new surrealist programming language, which I hope will make Haskell obsolete (other than as an assembly language). Briefly, functional languages are good because they are *declarative*, and you don't have to write lots of sequencing statements, assignemnts etc. But surrealist languages are better because they are *suggestive*, and you don't even have to write any functions! It takes a while to get used to this much higher level of programming. For example, a shell sort is just a drawing of an eggshell on top of an overturned rowing boat. The type system is pretty hard to master too --- can I connect a head directly to a foot? It depends on the context --- so never complain about Type Classes, which are trivial by comparison. I'm currently building a prototype Surrealist Recursive Calculator (SRC) here at Exeter which accepts surrealist programs in HTML. There, I hope that was crazy enough ... :-) David Wakeling (inventor of surrealist programming) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr David Wakeling | "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to Department of Computer Science | win glorious triumphs, even though checkered University of Exeter | by failure, than to take rank with those poor Exeter EX4 4PT | spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer United Kingdom | much, because they live in the gray twilight phone: +44 1392 264054 | that knows not victory or defeat." fax: +44 1392 264067 | http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~david | -- Theodore Roosevelt -------------------------------------------------------------------------------(Back to Haskerl index.)