Haskell.NET: The Art of Avoiding Work

Oliver Hunt, Masters Student

Dept. CSSE, University of Canterbury

Fri Aug 18 15:10:00 NZST 2006 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

Avoiding work has been a goal of programmers for decades. It is therefore unsurprising that a number of programming languages have been developed to help foster this goal. Unfortunately the traditional mechanisms to support such laziness are no longer compatible with modern Object Oriented Virtual Machines (OOVMs).

In addition to preventing the 'non-strict' evaluation of lazy languages there are a number of features from non-OO type systems for which there are no trivial conversions to OOVMs. The principle features we will be examining are higher ranked and higher kinded types.

In our presentation we discuss a number of mechanisms to allow support for these 'incompatible' aspects of these languages on an OOVM.