ActiveVRML in Haskell -- Part II
by Paul Hudak
(joint work with Ming Yang)
Several weeks ago I began the talk described below. On Friday I will
finish it, with emphasis on dynamic events and reactive behavior.
Come find out why monads are way cooler than global variables! :-)
ActiveVRML in Haskell
VRML = Virtual Reality Modeling Language. Although browsers exist for
VRML 1.0, it is a completely static description language -- there is
no notion of animation or interaction. VRML 2.0 is intended to remedy
this problem, and Microsoft has recently proposed ActiveVRML as a
potential candidate for VRML 2.0. ActiveVRML -- except for a strange
treatment of time -- is a purely functional language. In fact, its
syntax is most similar to that of ML, and its interaction semantics is
most similar to Haskell's monadic IO. I will describe ActiveVRML and
a very preliminary embedding of it in Haskell, with emphasis on typing
issues and the treatment of dynamic events and time-varying behaviors.