On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 02:47:30AM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote: > Hi, > > I've been wondering what is essential to Haskell and what isn't. Not > from a point of view of what could be removed from the language, but > what could be removed from a Core language. > > Given the features of higher-order, laziness and data types: > > Laziness can be converted to higher-order functions
Is this a pure language? If so you have to lose asymptotic performance in some cases, In "More haste, less speed: lazy versus eager evaluation" by Richard Bird, Geraint Jones and Oege De Moor there's an example of a function that can be implemented in linear time in a lazy language but requires O(n log n) time in a strict pure language. It doesn't matter if you just want to reason about results, and on the other hand for an intermediate language I suppose you might prefer to add state and explicitly manipulate the thunking. Brandon _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
