Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 05:55:45 02/18/04
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At CMU, I took 15-212 (Functional Programming). Basically, we learned Standard ML (ML stands for metalanguage) and wrote some rather complex stuff, including a parser/typechecker/runtime environment for a small Logo-like language (it included functions, and custom types if I remember correctly). Basically, it took most people a while to transition from C to ML. Some people never did it. I had one friend who, while an incredibly sharp C/assembly coder (currently getting his PhD at CMU in signal processing) just didn't "get" ML. It is simply different, and if you try to write C-ish ML you will fail miserably. ML allows you to write some amazingly compact and readable programs. I seem to remember posting an implementation of regular expressions in ML - it is about 25 lines, versus several hundred for a C implementation. I made far fewer mistakes in ML than in C, and most of those were caught by the type-checker, not at runtime. If you can get a program to "compile" in ML, there is at least a 50% chance it will work perfectly on the first run. Standard ML is about 10 times slower than C. OCAML, the french version, is about 50% slower. I don't think functional languages are a good idea for writing chess programs, but they certainly have their place. anthony
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