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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I would love to also run the interpreter inside iOS to learn Haskell from a tablet.

I will support a crowdfunding campaign.

That would be nice... and remember, Carmack mentioned that he felt guilty about not doing "real work" when he was doing Haskell, but because there was Lisp on his iWhatever, he could play with Lisp when he couldn't get to his main computer to do "real work", so spent more time on Lisp.

Shouldn't be too hard, if it really supports all of GHC...

the reason that won't happen is simple: GHCI works by doing dynamic linking. The iOS security model does not allow dynamic linking.

(There may be some clever way to modify how GHCI works to change that, but offhand, its not obvious to me what that would be)

haskell has plenty of interpreters

True! But I like to use lots of the type extensions that ghc has! :-)

Apple wouldn't permit this in the AppStore

I don't think that's quite right, if I understand correctly you could have the interpreter so long as there was no download and run of external code.

I'm sure I've seen a Lua environment like this.

Correct. Both python and lisp (Lisping) already have interpreters available as well.

Sure they would.

http://omz-software.com/pythonista/

http://omz-software.com/editorial/

http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

You just can't have an app that downloads external code and then runs it; if all of the code that gets run is prepackaged in the app bundle or user-generated then it's absolutely fine.

Are browsers exempt? Because there are a few of them there, and they download and execute external JavaScript.

I believe all browsers in the app store that run js use Apple's UIWebView and don't run the js themselves.

They have to use Apple's JS engine.

> they download and execute external JavaScript

Yes, but they may do so only by embedding Apple's own sandboxed WebKit component. So the downloading, execution, and results are tightly controlled.

I thought those were running interpreters via javascript. User-generated code is really okay?

I installed this from the App Store two days ago on John Carmack's recommendation:

http://slidetocode.com

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