Calling hell from heaven and heaven from hell

Abstract

The increasing popularity of component-based programming tools offer a big opportunity to designers of advanced programming languages, such as Haskell. If we can package our programs as COM objects, then it is easy to integrate them into applications written in other languages. In earlier work we described a preliminary integration of Haskell with Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), focusing on how Haskell can create and invoke COM objects. This paper develops that work, concentrating on the mechanisms that support externally-callable Haskell functions, and the encapsulation of a Haskell program as a COM object. 1 Introduction "Component-based programming" is all the rage. It has come to mean an approach to software construction in which a program is an assembly software components, perhaps written in different languages, glued together by some common substrate [16]. The most widely used substrates are Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), and the Common Object Request Broke...