From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA30585; Mon, 19 Nov 2001 10:02:37 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA30678 for ; Mon, 19 Nov 2001 10:02:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from wetware.wetware.com (wetware.wetware.com [199.108.16.1]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fAJ92Z112830 for ; Mon, 19 Nov 2001 10:02:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from localhost([208.177.152.18]) (2057 bytes) by wetware.wetware.com via sendmail with P:esmtp/R:bind_hosts/T:inet_zone_bind_smtp (sender: ) id for ; Mon, 19 Nov 2001 01:02:34 -0800 (PST) (Smail-3.2.0.111 2000-Feb-17 #5 built 2000-Dec-22) Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 01:02:33 -0800 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: variance, subtyping and monads... oh, my! Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v472) From: james woodyatt To: The Trade Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <20011119091119.A29570@pauillac.inria.fr> Message-Id: <2B0C11B2-DCCC-11D5-B196-000502DB38F5@wetware.com> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.472) Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 12:11 , Francois Pottier wrote: > James Woodyatt wrote: >> Now, is it my imagination, or is all that research into what you can >> build out of monads primarily a way for Haskell people to rediscover >> everything we already know about polymorphism, inheritance and >> encapsulation? > > Isn't that a bit harsh? Maybe. I'm more of a developer than a researcher. As with any research, it's not useful to me until I know how and why to apply it. If it *isn't* just my imagination, and it turns out that monadic programming is only a way to apply object-oriented programming techniques in purely functional languages, then I'd have to ask, "What's the point?" We've already discovered object-oriented programming, as well as how to integrate it with a functional language, i.e. Objective Caml. If by using monads, on the other hand, I can do something easily that would otherwise be very awkward, then I'm sold. So far, I have only found examples of how to do things I can already do better with the imperative and object-oriented styles in OCaml. Last month's Communications of the ACM (or was it the month before?) had a special on "aspect-oriented programming," which intrigued me. Is there, perhaps, a natural application of monadic programming there? -- j h woodyatt "somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --jerry garcia ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr