Lambda the Ultimate

As mentioned in a post last week, my experience with functional programming is pretty much all Scheme. I've gone through the SICP lectures and I get it... I am wary of !, and I understand why avoiding assignement is a good idea. After starting The Haskell School of Expression, I am curious as to people's visceral reaction to Haskell being a purely functional language. Do you find Haskell's approach creatively cumbersome at times? The feel I get from Haskell is that everything you program requires something "clever" in order to express it in a functional manner. Is that just my perception, is it a popular misnomer, or is it (even somewhat) true? I tend to sympathize with the kind of elitism that favors ideas that are "pure"... but can purity be an achiles heel? Why should I choose a language that denies me the understandibly dangerous power that accompanies assignment? What's "in it for me"? Is Haskell's type inference dependent upon assumptions about purity? Enlighten me, oh LtU gurus.

Have you ever pressed the "stop" button in your web browser? Did it always work? Should PLs make it easier for developers to make it work?

Asynchronous Exceptions in Haskell

Asynchronous exceptions, such as timeouts, are important for robust, modular programs, but are extremely difficult to program with — so much so that most programming languages either heavily restrict them or ban them altogether. We extend our earlier work, in which we added synchronous exceptions to Haskell, to support asynchronous exceptions too. Our design introduces scoped combinators for blocking and unblocking asynchronous interrupts, along with a somewhat surprising semantics for operations that can suspend. Uniquely, we also give a formal semantics for our system.

According to amazon.com, Ravi, Sethi, and Ullman are (finally!!!) issuing a revision to the series of "Dragon Books"; this one is entitled Twenty-First Century Compilers. If amazon is to be believed, it should be published by the end of the year. Monica Lam (of Stanford) has been added to the author team as well.

Has anybody seen an advanced copy of the book? I know that Alfred Aho has been using it in his classes at Columbia, but I've seen little information on it otherwise (beyond the summaries at amazon and on Ullman's home page). Any comments on the new material?

And the important question (this may be a closely-guarded secret):

What color is the dragon on the cover?

Inquiring minds, as they say, wanna know.