[E-Lang] pending revision of E in a Walnut

[Mark S. Miller]

At 07:15 PM Tuesday 8/21/01, Paul Snively wrote:
>One thought that occurs to me is that E falls into the trap of not having a
>functional REPL (read-eval-print loop, for those not in the Lisp tradition).
>Of course, so do most Lisps. :-) [...] encountered this issue in
>a pedagogical setting and solved it in their DrScheme system
><http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/drscheme/>, implementing a
>functional REPL for DrScheme.

What is a *functional* REPL?  Is there a particular page you can cite at 
the DrScheme site that explains the issue?  E does have a REPL that's 
similar in spirit to traditional Scheme REPLs.


>[...] I believe has its best resolution
>by somehow reifying monads as capabilities (or capabilities as monads; I'm
>not sure which direction makes the most sense). [...] capabilities and
>monads [...] perhaps the only
>way (that I can see, at any rate) to uniformly and comprehensively address
>I/O in a pure capability system.  [...]It may very well be that E
>routinely relies on things that category theorists would recognize as
>"monads" even if I myself do not at first blush.

And what's a Monad?  I've already got links to papers that would explain 
this to me, once I learn to read Haskell notation.  However, something short 
that didn't assume this background would be great.


        Cheers,
        --MarkM