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Showing posts from December, 2007

ML Modules in C#

I've written about the limitations of C#'s equational constraints before . Truth is, I now believe that any such limits can be circumvented by a relatively simple translation. The result is less "object-oriented", as it requires a set of cooperating objects instead of being encapsulated in a single object. Let's take a simple, unsafe list flattening operation described in Generalized Algebraic Data Types and Object-Oriented Programming (GADTOOP) . This can be expressed in OCaml as: let List = struct type 'a t = Nil | Cons of 'a * 'a t let append l a = Cons(a, l) let flatten la = Cons(a, l) -> append a (flatten l) | Nil -> Nil end The argument to flatten, la, is a list of lists of type 'a. However, there is no way to express this in C# without unrestricted equational constraints as I described earlier. Here is the translation to C# from GADTOOP: public abstract class List<T> {... public abstract List<T> Append(Lis