Communication with the no-functional world.

[Simon L Peyton Jones]

>Many people complain about types, classes, lack of litterate programs,
>I think that what is badly missing in Clean is not better class system
>or user interface, but a good interface with the non-functional world.
>People often need external data bases (SQL), multimedia, sounds, graphic
>displayers, etc. All these tools would be available if one had an
>interface with C.

I think this remark is absolutely true, and is true of other functional
languages, not just Clean.  What is holding us back is not performance
(any more) but rather the difficulty of integrating our programs into
the rest of the world.

This is something the Haskell community has been paying quite a bit
of attention to recently.  Perhaps some of the ideas developed there
could be adopted, refined, improved, for Clean?  Perhaps some of
it is already available in Clean... (references?).  The design
of these things is quite interesting -- we should share ideas.

Embedding Haskell programs in Web pages
	http://haskell.org/active/activehaskell.html

Writing CGI scripts in Haskell
	http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~erik/Personal/cgi.htm

Interfacing between Haskell and C
  http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/fp/authors/Simon_Peyton_Jones/green-card-1.ps.gz

Component based programming: interfacing between Haskell and COM
	http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~simonpj/com.ps.gz

Simon