Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 03:06:38 08/01/03
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On July 31, 2003 at 17:32:47, Dan Andersson wrote: > ML or SML stands for Meta Language. A functional language commonly used for >teaching functional programming. Best variant IMO is OCaml that includes object >orientation and blazing performance when running both bytecode and natively. But >Scheme is my preferred functional language. Second is Haskell and it sports the >most clean implementation of a lazy functional PL. > >MvH Dan Andersson With all respect Dan, but functional languages are a pure waste of your time. Haskell in combination with the pure functional Gofer for example is a factor 10000 slower (interpreted of course, because you can't compile it unless you use the outdated turbo c++) litterary. I had written a checkers program (8x8 polish rules though) in Gofer/Haskell. It searched 1 node each so many seconds thanks to the dead slow lazy evaluation of the language. Then i ported it straight on to C and that ran at 10000 nodes a second. That was very unoptimized C code. Note that a person who promoted to doctor (not sure what it is called in english) has put in a lot of effort speeding up my gofer code. He managed after months of work to get it 2 times faster. We talk about a factor 5000 difference. At the same time i managed to get the checkersprogram in C also a factor 4 faster by writing a smarter move generator, which thanks to the imperative nature of it (it's using pregenerated tables of course) is not possible to use in Gofer without slowing it down a factor X first. The most important thing however is that any serious application cannot be developed in such functional languages, even if it was a factor 5000 faster. You end up with zillions of short functions. In 100 line programs that might perhaps still sound cool, but as you understand a simple checkers program is already quite some longer and then it already tends to get a mess, even when written by doctor Gofer. Best regards, Vincent
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