Re: If not Ada, what else...

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.invalid>]

On 29.07.15 17:41, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Here is an exercise that is easy in Haskell but surprisingly tedious in
> languages like Ada

OTOH, it keeps being surprisingly tedious to turn clear and simple
Haskell algorithms into something that respects time and storage. GHC
seems to have become just a little better over the years.

Naively computing a sum picking by picking every mth element
from a list,

picksum :: [Int] -> Int -> Int
picksum [] m = 0
picksum xs m
            | m <= 0 = 0
            | m  > 0 = mth xs
   where mth l@(y:ys) = y + mth (drop m l)
         mth []       = 0

Then, try this with the justly famed easy list notation, passing
[1 .. 12345678], or larger. (I have GHC 7.8.3, maybe that's too old?)

Of course, the language war soldier of Haskell will argue that the
enemy writer of the above algorithm was stupid, and that the same
thing happens if you do use lists in Ada, from Ada.Containers,
instead of what any competent programmer would be writing in either
language. Whatever that might be.

But it's definitely good for prototyping, that much seems obvious,
I think.