Re: to have labels or not

From: Pierre Weis (Pierre.Weis@inria.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 15:43:31 MET DST

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    > I should note that most functional programming languages are
    > designed by people with a strong academic/theoretical bent, rather
    > than an industrial bent, and so issues like the type system get a
    > lot more attention IMO than human engineering issues. I think the
    > Modula-3 book by Nelson had a nice section on the language design
    > with the different types of designer given colorful names like
    > "Lambdaman", "Hackwell", etc. FPs appear to be designed by entire
    > teams of "Lambdamen". (OK, perhaps I'm being a little bit
    > provocative here ;-)

    You certainly are provocative, as far as the Caml team is concerned:
    we consistently insisted on practicability and usability of the
    language, writing theoretical articles on better handling of
    side-effects features, better design of modules to allow separate
    compilation, better compilation of floating point numbers and
    operations, etc; and then we implemented all those nice ideas into
    fairly usable compilers. Last but not least ``concession'' to
    praticability: this entire set of new basic types and operations for
    integers and big arrays...

    Best regards,

    -- 
    Pierre Weis
    

    INRIA, Projet Cristal, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis



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