On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, William D.Neumann wrote:

> His point seems to be that programming in a "functional style"[1] is 
> inherently slower than an imperative style because a list or a map have 
> different performance characteristics than do arrays.

Nick Pippinger gave the first crisp result comparing performance of 
functional and imperative languages in "Pure vs Impure Lisp" [POPL 1996]. 
Researchers like Oege de Moor are working on characterizing more of these 
differences.

--
Christopher Dutchyn
UBC Computer Science