You can. Imagine a version of Haskell where every constructor was strict, e.g. every field had a ! prefix. The semantics of this language are well defined; and in fact, the fine folks at CMU have known about this for some time:
Up to this point we have frequently encountered arbitrary choices in the dynamics of various language constructs. For example, when specifying the dynamics of pairs, we must choose, rather arbitrarily, between the lazy dynamics, in which all pairs are values regardless of the value status of their components, and the eager dynamics, in which a pair is a value only if its components are both values. We could even consider a half-eager (or, equivalently, half-lazy) dynamics, in which a pair is a value only if, say, the first component is a value, but without regard to the second.
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Joe Zimmerman recently shared with me a cool new way of thinking about various encryption schemes called functional encryption. It’s expounded upon in more depth in a very accessible recent paper by Dan Boneh et al.. I’ve reproduced the first paragraph of the abstract below:
We initiate the formal study of functional encryption by giving precise definitions of the concept and its security. Roughly speaking, functional encryption supports restricted secret keys that enable a key holder to learn a specific function of encrypted data, but learn nothing else about the data. For example, given an encrypted program the secret key may enable the key holder to learn the output of the program on a specific input without learning anything else about the program.
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Functions are awesome. What if we made a PL that only had functions?
Objects are awesome. What if we made a PL where everything was an object?
Lazy evaluation is awesome. What if we made a PL where every data type was lazy?
Extremist programming (no relation to extreme programming) is the act of taking some principle, elevating it above everything else and applying it everywhere. After the dust settles, people often look at this extremism and think, “Well, that was kind of interesting, but using X in Y was clearly inappropriate. You need to use the right tool for the job!”
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“Everything is a file.” [1] This was the design philosophy taken to its logical extreme in Plan 9. Any interface you could imagine was represented as a file. Network port, pixel buffers, kernel interfaces—all were unified under a common API: the file operations (open, read, write…) Plan 9 used this to eliminate most of its system calls: it had only thirty-nine, in contrast to modern Linux’s sprawling three hundred and twenty-six.
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I’m taking a Data Visualization course this fall, and one of our assignments was to create an interactive visualization. So I thought about the problem for a little bit, and realized, “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a version of hp2ps that was both interactive and accessible from your browser?” (hp2any fulfills this niche partially, but as a GTK application).
A week of hacking later: hp/D3.js, the interactive heap profile viewer for GHC heaps. Upload your hp files, share them with friends! Our hope is that the next time you need to share a heap profile with someone, instead of running hp2ps on it and sending your colleague the ps file, you’ll just upload the hp file here and send a colleague your link. We’ve tested it on recent Firefox and Chrome, it probably will work on any sufficiently modern browser, it definitely won’t work with Internet Explorer.
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