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by chowells 1452 days ago
In a language like Haskell, pattern matching was explicitly chosen to be a primitive operation. It's not that there's no way to put it in a library; it's that it was chosen to be one of the small set of ideas everything else is described in terms of. Along with allocation and function application, you've got the entirety of Haskell's evaluation model. (Note: not execution model. That needs a bit more.) Having such a small evaluation model probably should be taken as evidence the primitives were chosen well.
1 comments
a1369209993 1452 days ago
> Note: not execution model. That needs a bit more.

Actually... not really? You need the foreign function interface to have anything useful to execute, but (unless you're talking about something else?) the execution model is basically just a State monad carrying a unique magic token, built on top of the same evaluation model as everything else.

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chowells 1452 days ago
The execution model needs something that actually drives execution. There needs to be something that explains how IO actions are actually run. The state approach kind of works until you need to explain multiple threads, then it falls over.

Edward Kmett did some work to describe IO as an external interpreter working through a free monad. That approach provides very neat semantics that include multiple threads and FFI easily.

But IO needs something to make it go, and that something needs capabilities that aren't necessary for the evaluation model.

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a1369209993 1452 days ago
> The execution model needs something that actually drives execution.

Er, yes: specifically, execution is drivenby trying to pull the final RealWorld token out of a expression along the lines of `runState (RealWorld#) (main)`, which requires the evaluation of (the internal RealWorld -> (RealWorld,a) functions of) IO actions provided by FFI functions (hence why you need FFI to have anything useful (or more accurately, side-effectual) to execute).

> until you need to explain multiple threads

I don't. It's a terrible idea that's effectively the apotheosis of premature (and ill-targeted) optimization as the root of all evil.

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