On Saturday 03 May 2003 17:37, John Max Skaller wrote:
> Eray Ozkural wrote:
> > On Monday 28 April 2003 17:22, David Brown wrote:
> >>To me, the core feature of functional programming are first class
> >>closures.  Everything else just makes it more convenient.
> >
> > Well said. I would also like to say here that I fail to see what
> > distinguishes the core of ocaml and haskell so much from a semantics
> > point of view!!!!!!!
>
> Laziness.

I know all the fluff about laziness. I wrote code that used so-called 
"infinite graphs" and another code that did have higher order functions which 
used monadic parameters and a lot of sequencing of monadic code if you want 
to verify that. But I, as a programmer not as a lambda-calculus addict, see 
laziness as an "evaluation strategy" not as a deep semantic difference. What 
I meant is whether this difference is exaggerated. I think it is, and I also 
think that monadic I/O is just a pretty (and burdensome) way of writing 
sequential code. Something that isn't wildly interesting from a semantic POV.

Here is what I'm trying to really mean: I can write a compiler for a subset of 
ocaml that uses only lazy evaluation. [*] Right or wrong?

[*] For any pure functional language I should be able to do that. Just like 
Haskell compilers I don't really have to care whether the resulting code will 
work reasonably or not.

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara  KDE Project: http://www.kde.org
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B  EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C

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