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Re:The Scotch programming language - my Christmas break 2010... by effigies on Friday December 24, 2010 @01:32PM (#2037749)
This is kind of neat. It seems like it'd be useful as a more easily debugged Haskell.

I'd be more inclined to actually play with it, though, if it accepted a superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting. So I might write:

    do
        pure code
        {- Scotch debug statements
        ...
        -}
        pure code
And then just dump it into the Scotch compiler/interpreter when I ran into issues.

Of course, this would only work if you could guarantee semantic equivalence to the Haskell except in those debug bits.

Re:The Scotch programming language - my Christmas break 2010... by Miky on Friday December 24, 2010 @05:10PM (#2038098)
"A superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting" doesn't really make any sense with Haskell's semantics, unless you're talking about unsafePerformIO, which already exists.
Re:The Scotch programming language - my Christmas break 2010... by bendmorris on Friday December 24, 2010 @11:12PM (#2038505)
Thanks for the comment. One of my main goals was definitely to make an easier-to-debug and easier-to-throw-things-together-quickly-in functional language. To help accomplish this goal, there are some other significant differences from Haskell, such as dynamic/weak typing and cleaner syntax - I think that some aspects of Haskell's syntax are barriers to adoption and comprehension, so I'm going for a more Python-esque "readable pseudocode" syntax as much as possible. So, there will never quite be equivalence to Haskell. I think your idea would make an interesting project as well, and as a Haskell user I'd definitely use it.
Re:The Scotch programming language - my Christmas break 2010... by batterseapower on Friday December 24, 2010 @06:16PM (#2038215)
You can "printf debug" Haskell code pretty well using 'trace' (http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/...) which was designed for the purpose.

The lack of gdb support for Haskell is very irritating, but it seems you won't get that with Scotch at the moment either.