From: wand@dec5120z.ccs.northeastern.edu (Mitchell Wand)

Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
From: wand@dec5120z.ccs.northeastern.edu (Mitchell Wand)
Subject: Re: a note on the Haskerl extension to Haskell
In-Reply-To: sailor@skorpio.usask.ca's message of 5 Apr 1993 21: 19:26 GMT
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1993 13:47:47 GMT

In article <1pq7ou$ks9@access.usask.ca> sailor@skorpio.usask.ca (Ken Sailor)
writes:

# I haven't heard the term FWIM before, but am interested
# in FWIM languages.  I assume it is a play on ISWIM (I Say What I Mean, Landin),
# and am interested to know the origin of FWIM and what languages it applies to.
# Any pointers?

I assume it is a play on "DWIM" (Do What I Mean), which was a feature of
InterLisp in the 70's.  It was an idea died because in practice it was
undebuggable: you had to figure out what the system THOUGHT you meant.  

My impression is that FWIM suffers from the same disease. Anybody want to
write a semantics for Perl:-? 

BTW, some folks here were of the opinion that the Haskerl posting was an April
Fool's joke (it WAS posted on 4-1-93).  

--Mitch