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v busy - didn't have time to check if it's sensible.
It looks interesting, but I find the implicit parameter stuff sufficiently different that I don't trust my intuition as to correctness. I hope we can see some formal treatments of various implicit parameter mechanisms soon -- I'd be a lot more comfortable with it if I could see the key concepts in as simple a setting as possible. Has anybody written a paper on, say, lambda-calculus or PCF or whatever + implicit parameters?
Actually, Ben proposes the converse of implicit parameters, i.e. implicit return values.
* implicit parameters subsume the Reader monad. * implicit return values subsume the Writer monad. * together they subsume lots of monads... IO, ST, etc.
My intuition is that implicit return values breaks referential transparency. That's because they allow to to have state threaded through computation in a completely implicit way.
My intuition is that implicit return values breaks referential transparency.
the google link a couple of posts back said [...] implicit parameters [...] provide[s] dynamically scoped variables [...] so (unless i'm confused about what the terms mean - which is possible, since i couldn't define referential transparency clearly if you paid me) they certainly do break referential transparency. i always thought dynamic scoping was supposed to be the work of the devil, so it will be interesting to see what the "motivating arguments" are in that paper.