python and haskell for fun

Kendall Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Mon Mar 11 16:34:07 EST 2002


>>>>> "sandy" == Sandy Norton <sandskyfly at hotmail.com> writes:

  sandy> "Patrick" wrote:
  >> This subset of PASKELL will be clean, beautiful and functional.

  sandy> I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I meant 'beget a pretty monster' of
  sandy> an application, not a language. The last thing I would want
  sandy> to do is waste time discussing a new hybrid 'PASKELL'
  sandy> language...

I've been daydreaming for about a year of a Python implementation
written in Haskell, which would obviously make writing Python
extensions in Haskell easier (and more elegant, IMO, than writing them
in C or Java).

However, John Paul Skaller did something similar with Ocaml, which he
called Vyper, and that went over in the Py world like a leaden balloon
-- actually it went over about as poorly as Stackless Python did;
which does cause me to wonder what it is about Python culture, if
anything, that's resistant to unusual alternative implementations?. A
Python implementation in Haskell is probably a fool's task. Though
given the various Haskell compilers, including some pretty impressive
parallelizing stuff, it is an interesting idea.

(Ocaml is pretty much Caml + objects; Caml is INRIA's implementation
of ML; in the neighborhood of Haskell, but less syntactially elegant,
IMO.)

At least, a Haskell implementation of Python seems more practical than
a Python implementation of Haskell, which would be rather toylike. But
YMMV.

Best,
Kendall Clark




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