On 20 Nov 2003, skaller wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 09:28, Brian Hurt wrote:
> > Wandering into language advocacy here.
> 
> > 
> > For any large, complex, data structure & algorithm heavy application, 
> > Ocaml is the best language I know of.  It's not the best possible 
> > language (I can think of a number of improvements to Ocaml I'd like to 
> > see), but it's better for that purpose than any other language I know.
> 
> What about Haskell? Doesn't lazy evaluation have a significant
> advantage?
> 

1) Lazy evaluation comes with a performance penalty.
2) Lazy evaluation + imperitive programming == hard to track down bugs
3) While there are programs which will terminate with lazy evaluation that 
won't terminate with strict evalulation, such programs mainly appear only 
as counter examples.  If I know that I'm in a strict evaluation language, 
I just don't do that ("Doctor- it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do 
that then!").

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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