Re: Haskell, anyone?

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

mockturtle <framefritti@gmail.com> writes:
> Oh, well, back to the tutorial...

Haskell is one of the most interesting things I've done as a programmer,
and anyone into programming languages as an area of interest rather than
just as tools should try it out.  It's very different from Ada in the
sense of being a typed Lisp descendant, with a fairly complex runtime
system that makes heavy use of garbage collection.  So as Mark says, it
doesn't give you precise control of cpu or memory utilization the way
Ada does.  In fact it's easy to write Haskell code that consumes large
amounts of memory by accident (so-called space leaks).  It takes a while
to understand Haskell well enough to avoid these.

If it helps, I'd say the archetypal Ada application is something like a
jet engine controller, that absolutely has to satisfy realtime and
memory constraints, must never throw exceptions, etc, but whose
underlying function is reasonably simple (squirt fuel into the engine at
the just the right time).

The archetypal Haskell application OTOH is e.g. a compiler, that does
intricate transformations on complicated data, that must not produce a
wrong answer (i.e. generate wrong code), but for which other types of
failure (like taking too long or running out of memory) are merely
inconveniences (you fix the bug or find a workaround if that happens).