What is the 'expression problem'?

Question

I have a rough idea about what this is but if someone has an explanation of the 'expression problem' that they think is succinct and intuitive I would love to hear it.

Answer 1

Watch this lecture.

The idea is that your program is combination of a datatype and operations over it. The problem asks for an implementation that allows to add new cases of the type and new operations without the need for recompilation of the old modules and keeping static type safety(no casts or runtime type checks).

It's interesting to notice that in functional programming languages it's easy to add new operations, but hard to add cases to the datatype. While in an OO language it's the other way round. This is one of the big conceptual differences between the two programming paradigms.

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_Problem

See also

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/171755/visitor-pattern-open-closed-principle/171768#171768

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3671854/type-classes-in-scala

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2078978/functional-programming-vs-object-oriented-programming/2079678#2079678

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/870919/why-are-haskell-algebraic-data-types-closed/871375#871375