some thoughts on Clean 2.0

[panitz]

Hello Clean community!

The other day I found an old clean manual on my book shelve:
'concurrent clean language manual version 0.8.3 february 1993'.
In those days I was playing around with clean on a small
apple powerbook (with 4mb memory..)

Well that is some time ago! Nowadays I mainly use clean on my small
linux laptop or an old mac desktop.

I remember the fist time when Rinus Plasmijer presented clean 1.0 on a
conference and how I was looking forward to that release.
Now we are waiting for the second mayor clean release: Clean 2.0!

If I understand the information on the web site correctly this will
be a completely new dimension for clean and clean no longer looks
like a fast Haskell compiler with a little bit different syntax
and a good IO library, but a more powerful language with a lot of
additional features:

dynamics:
is this what I think? like in good old lisp days converting a string
into an epression? Wow! I could have used that in a program, where I now
wrote a parser for certain expressions.

btw: those very long threads in comp.language.functional 'static vs dynamic
typing' will have a simple answer in the future: Clean! Especially I wonder
what the Erlang people will say. They insist that dynamic typing and linking
is needed in their area of application.

Since the new Clean compiler is written mainly in clean, does that mean
that with dynamics we also get a Hugs like interpreter for clean?

And you are also planning to make the parts written in clean open source?
Well who knows what will happen with that. Maybe someone who does not know
what to do with his/her spare time will write a Haskell frontend, so
that one can have mixed Haskell/Clean projects (and moving from
Haskell to Clean will be fairly easy, or using Haskell libraries will be
possible).
How difficult would it be to write such a Haskell frontend?
I guess the Clean compiler has some intermediate language,
so a Haskell parser and type  checker as well as a
transformer to that intermediate language would be needed.
And these things could be derived from the Clean parser and typ checker
or from some Haskell compiler written itself in Haskell (e.g. nhc and
then the 'n' of nhc could have a new meaning ...:-)).

Well, I am looking forward to Clean 2.0, but I know, in order the get the
quality we are used from the team in Nijmegen, we simply have to wait
a bit more.

Regards Sven Eric,
(who still could not convince his boss to make a project in
Clean and is therefore forced to make his living with Java hacking :-( )