Re: Announcing JGNAT public version 1.0p

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner)]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000 08:44:41 -0700, Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
>On 10 Apr 2000, David Starner wrote:
>> ML and Ada aren't really in competition. Ada is a safety orientated, strongly
>> typed imperative langauage. ML is a writablity orientated, weirdly typed (-:,
>> functional language. ML's an excellent language to do prototypes and proofs
>> of concept in, whereas Ada and most other low level (compared to ML) languages
>> aren't. OTOH, ML usually isn't the appropriate language for a shipping
>> product. 
>
>Ouch again a few times. Weirdly typed? Writability orientated?

Okay, strongly typed with type inferance. I've never seen ML's
form of typing in any other language. SML seems strongly
orientated to writability, including constructs ("and", as opposed
to forward references) orienated towards typing into an interpreter
instead of writing it and running it through the interpreter.

>BTW, the company I work for ships a product in (OCa)ML. I see no reason
>why it is less appropriate than say Perl, Tcl, Python, or Java, all of
>which are used in shipping products.

Fair enough. But all of those languages are in a different class than
C++ or Ada, and appropriately used for a different set of shipping
products.

>> Last time I tried to run a big program in ML, it got bogged down, 
>> swapping stuff in and out of core. When I tried rewriting in Ada, I kept 
>> having bugs in what ML did automatically (my lists implementation, 
>> in specific). 
>
>That's a complaint about implementation, not language. People used to
>complain that Ada code was slow, too. 

Yes and no. The reason why Ada code was slow, was partially because Ada's
main goal was safety. While efficency was a primary goal, other things
took precedence. Hence it took work to make an efficent Ada compiler, more
than it would have for C or Fortran, two languages with efficency as a main
goal.

(S)ML doesn't seem to have efficency as a major goal. Hence, a naive
implementation will be slow. Can a good implementation make up much
of the difference? Probably. But there's only so much that can be done,
and it's questionable whether a well-written functional program will ever 
catch up to a well-written imperative program, just like well-written
assembly is still faster than well-written imperative programs.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Only a nerd would worry about wrong parentheses with
square brackets. But that's what mathematicians are.
   -- Dr. Burchard, math professor at OSU