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0 pointsfexl14y ago0 comments

Definitely without the types, yes. However, monads are completely do-able in Fexl. I can write Fexl code that looks procedural and "side-effect-y", using the monadic technique so that you never actually see the state variable that's being chained through the functions. Monads are more a style of code than a feature of the language per se.

Personally I'm quite happy without the baggage of type declarations. As long as I build up functions systematically, I have very few problems with run-type type violations. Sure every once in a while I forget a semicolon or whatever and my function gets "out of synch" like a T-1 line gone out of phase. But it's usually pretty easy to see what went wrong.

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gmartres14y ago· 1 in thread

Yeah, I know how monads work, what I mean was that according to the examples you don't seem to enforce purity(nothing like the IO monad).

And I've never found types to be a burden in Haskell, the type inference works great so that you can usually omit them if you can't be bothered, but I still include them most of the time because they help you reason about your code and see patterns.

fexlOP14y ago

Right, I don't enforce purity, but I do allow it. Ultimately there's a "string_put" function which (1) produces an actual side effect and (2) evaluates to the identity function. You can wrap monadic (monastic?) purity around that if you like.

Also, strict typing is pretty much impossible in Fexl, since I'm using combinators. You can't really assign a meaningful type to things like S, C, I, Y, etc. So yes, Fexl is very "loosey-goosey" that way. I also didn't want to bother with some ponderous PhD project like a "type inference engine" written into my ANSI-C interpreter. I figure if you want to do high level things like that, write those tools in Fexl itself (i.e. use meta-programming techniques).

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