From: Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak@...>
Date: 2003-02-17T21:05:44+09:00
Subject: Re: General programming language question

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 19:04:42 +0900, Christian Szegedy <szegedy@nospam.or.uni-bonn.de> pisze:

> First of all, I don't agree that variables are first class
> objects in any of the above languages.

Mutable variables (SML & OCaml's ref, Haskell's IORef) are first-class.

Plain variables (named constants) aren't, and it's unnecessary,
since they are equivalent to their values.

> Secondly: There are several drawbacks of using Haskell, but it is
> definitively *NOT* the "ugly syntax". I would go so far to say that
> I have not seen a language with more elegant syntax than Haskell
> (even compared to Ruby).

I agree, but not for mutable variables.


Haskell:

   increment v = do
      value <- readIORef v
      writeIORef v (value + 1)


OCaml & SML:

   let increment v = v := !v + 1

   fun increment v = v := !v + 1


And in my language Kogut:

   increment $v = v := v + 1

which is the same as

   increment v = v (v() + 1)

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak@knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/