About Purity

["Pierre-Evariste Dagand" <pedagand@gmail.com>]

Hi list,

I'm looking for advices, especially from Computer Scientists using
OCaml as a language for their research works.

Here is my situation: I have worked on a system that relies on a
purely functional structure, let say a monad.
At the end, I have come up with a paper explaining how good and great
my work is ;-)
And finally, in order to get some feedback, my paper has been reviewed
by a Haskeller.

Here starts the issues :-)

Using OCaml in combination with a quite strange monad scared the
Haskeller. Indeed, as OCaml does not ensure referential transparency,
there is no formal proof that I'm pure and that what I have used is
truly a monad. And, no way, I did not succeed in convincing him that
my code is pure.

Nonetheless, I know that there are a lot of works in functional
programming that are carried out in OCaml.

So, my question is :

How do you convince these fanatics ;-) that you are pure ?


Obviously, I could show my code but it's about 2kloc that must be pure.

I am considering to re-write my system or at least the purely
functional subset in Haskell. But OCaml is like a mother tongue to me
so that's quite hard (sentimentally speaking) to leave it without
invoking the wisdom of its gurus.

Best regards,

-- 
Pierre-Evariste DAGAND