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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Haskell, anyone?
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:04:47 -0800
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Date: 2015-11-17T10:04:47-08:00
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Hadrien Grasland <hadrien.grasland@gmail.com> writes:
> I would say that recursion is the goto statement of functional
> programming languages : necessary in order to achieve
> Turing-completeness, and occasionally useful, but makes control flow
> messy and programs very difficult to reason about,

No that's continuations ;-).  Recursion works fine and is simpler
than loops to reason about and simple to use.

> The recursive hoops that one has to jump through in order to "modify"
> a complex data structure are especially gruesome.  Just implemented a
> radix tree in OCaml today

The FP preference would be to use an immutable data structure like a
red-black tree:

http://goodmath.scientopia.org/2009/11/30/advanced-haskell-data-structures-red-black-trees/