[mercury-users] There's nowt so boring as writing thesis

[Thomas Charles CONWAY]

Richard A. O'Keefe, you write:
> 	Is it just me, or is di/uo much more straightforward than all this
> 	monad stuff going on in the functional community?
> 	
> The "Clean" functional programming language has 'uniqueness types' which
> are basically the same as di/uo.  I must say I find I/O in Clean rather
> easier to use than monads.

However, to be fair, monads are the foundation for a whole host of things
which have nothing to do with uniqueness/CTGC/etc. For example the monadic
parser combinators can (not very conveniently) be modelled in Mercury using
higher order. Essentially in this instance, they provide a syntactic
frame work which is hard to beat (the Mercury equivalents of the monadic
parser combinators are not nearly so nice to use because of the syntactic
baggage of higher order programming in Mercury - unfortunately Mercury
is using early seventies syntax, and Haskell mid eighties.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Conway <conway at cs.mu.oz.au>
Nail here [] for new monitor.  )O+