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The only things I can think of are things that wouldn't enter the head of a Haskell programmer to begin with, such as syntactic shortcuts for complicated side e

by lukev 17y ago

The only things I can think of are things that wouldn't enter the head of a Haskell programmer to begin with, such as syntactic shortcuts for complicated side effects. So you're right, lazy evaluation can do just about anything in a purely functional environment. But now count the number of programming languages that provide a purely functional environment... The rest of us need macros.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
...such as syntactic shortcuts for complicated side effects. I can think of a couple of examples where I've done such things in lisp (mostly elisp, sometimes Clojure), but I don't see a good reason why I couldn't do them in Haskell. In fact, a function f: a -> M d (with M = IO, Writer or State if you want side effects) almost serves the same purpose: it turns a value into a set of actions to perform. I'm really curious, could you give an example of such a task/macro? (Note: I'm not trying to engage in a language war, I'm honestly curious. If I'm treating Haskell as Blub, I'd like to know about it.)