I will try to give a collective answer to the reactions to my letter.
Tom Pledger wants this to be constructive. That is my intention, of
course. Since I am not able to program in languages like C or
Oberon, I would like to have a practical lazy functional compiler
(or a practical prolog compiler). I hope to convince people to implement
such a compiler.
> Please, correct me if I am wrong: Clean is a proprietary language.
Yes. You are right. What is worse: They do not make this point very
clear (for instance, I could not find the price anywhere). You know, I do
not mind if the language is proprietary or not. However, if it is proprietary,
it should offer the services of a good proprietary system: A publisher,
books, advertising to produce a volume of installed system large enough
and competifive prices (a compiler should cost something around 200 dollars).
Simon Peyton Jones.
You are the person who called my attention to Clean. But let's concentrate
ourselves on Haskell. I infer from your letter that the GHC team has no
interest on building a practical Haskell compiler, but to play and experiment
with the language. Why the Haskell community
do not try to find someone who wants to build an industrial strength compiler?
I mean, a group who could produce a
competitive compiler, useful not only to people who are interested in testing
the language, but also in using it to produce commercial and industrial tools.
I will call the story of Smalltalk to your attention. They took so long to
produce a commercial compiler, and spent so much time experimenting
with the language, that people lost their interest in the language.
Fergus Henderson
Why a compiler should be small, and produce small code, etc?
A small compiler proves that its libraries can produce small code.
Besides, it becomes easier to install, and uninstall. For instance,
Dr. Alcimar (that you know quite well) is finishing his prosthetic arm
for amputees. Clean was able to produce code that was small enough,
uses heap sparingly, and was fast enough to do the pattern recognition
of electric myographic signals using a novel algorithm created by Dr.
Pascoarelli. The program must be small because it runs on a laptop computer,
with little memory (one can not ask an amputee fetching a large computer).
Conclusion: I think that we should look for groups interested
in producing a Haskell compiler. A friend of mine also suggested trying to
lure Clean team to eliminate the small incompatibilities that their system
have with Haskell. If a Clean feature is important and significative, it would
be let alone (for instance, unique types are fine). If it only makes the code
hard to read for Haskell programmers, it would be changed. An example is
the notation for list patterns (Clean could change [x:y} to (x:y)). Other
examples: Module handling, type declarations, etc.
I think that my posting is long enough.
Ed Costa.
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