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From: cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: Industry-Strength Rapid Prototyping with Functional Prog?
Message-ID: <1991Mar22.141414.26226@lgc.com>
Date: 22 Mar 91 14:14:14 GMT
References: <348@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>
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In article <348@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> paul@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>HELP! I am trying to raise the profile of FP in our undergraduate degree in
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>PLEASE can anyone supply me with examples/references to
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>(2) examples of FP-written RPs that do ``nice'' IO (in order to satisfy
>    people who think UI prototyping is necessary as well as functional
>    prototyping.
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[RP--rapid prototyping; UI--user interface]  This relates
to a question I've been thinking of posting for the last
week.  I'll introduce it with a bit of background.

I'm very naive about FP; all I know is what I read, 'cause
I haven't yet gone to the trouble of setting myself up
with an FP environment.  I'm a mathematician, and FP sure
looks right to me, but I know I have a lot more to learn.

My daily work for the last few years has involved a lot of
UI considerations.  In 1991, I've been Xprogramming.  As-
sume with me that X is a commercial success, but that
event-driven paradigms are a hurdle for many coders and
engineers.  How do mature FP thinkers react to this?

I'm not primarily looking for a textbook reference, although
any advice will get my attention.  What I want are some
down-to-earth words, perhaps on this model:  "Sure, the
usual model for UI is a dialogue--the user does something,
the computer does something, the user does something else,
and so on.  All this temporal sequencing seems antithetical
to FP principles, and of course the usual ways of imple-
menting the state of the dialogue make a funny joke in FP
circles; however, the way we see it is {FILL-IN-THIS-BLANK}."

A postscript:  if someone knows what FP environment is free,
easy-to-install on a PC or SPARCstation, and good practice
for autodidacts, I'm ready to listen.
--

Cameron Laird		USA 713-579-4613
cl@lgc.com		USA 713-996-8546