On 28-07-2012 18:07, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 7/28/12 10:04 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Saturday, 28 July 2012 at 12:42:47 UTC, Stuart wrote:
On Saturday, 28 July 2012 at 09:37:47 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
I tend to favour F# instead of OCaml due to three things
I've never really seen the point of F#. Aside from maths, what is F#
good for that a standard imperative language is not? Especially when
you consider that all flavours of .NET have native support for LINQ.
Let me see:
- Symbolic code manipulation;
- Metaprogramming;
- Easy parallelization of code thanks to immutable data structures and
workflows
- Type providers (comming in F# 3.0) to manipulate remote data as
language data types
- The right way of doing type inference (shared by all ML languages)
- Asynchronous programming builtin without having to wait for ..NET 4.5
- Algebraic data types
Microsoft wouldn't have brought F# into Visual Studio if it wasn't worth
it, Microsoft is a business, not a language charity company.
It was for Basic :o). Anyhow, indeed, the tools around it make F# pretty
cool (just not all that original as a language).
Andrei
What makes you say that?
I guess that opinion stems from F# being based on OCaml's syntax? (But
then to be fair, we would have to call D very unoriginal too...)
Either way, F# adds a *ton* of stuff on top of OCaml that makes it a far
superior language:
* Reified generics:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233215(v=vs.110)
* Inline functions (I'm still amazed D doesn't have this yet):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd548047(v=vs.110)
* Type extensions, a (IMO) much cleaner approach to artificially
extending types: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233211(v=vs.110)
* Pattern matching (oh how I miss this in compiler code):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd547125(v=vs.110)
* Annotations: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233179(v=vs.110)
* Units of measure:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233243(v=vs.110)
* Computation expressions (F#'s humanly understandable take on monads):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233182(v=vs.110)
* Code quotations, making for metaprogramming that can do things even
D's metaprogramming can't:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233212(v=vs.110)
* Async workflows (actually a library solution built through computation
expressions): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233250(v=vs.110)
* Query expressions (again, based on computation expressions):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh225374(v=vs.110)
* Automatic generalization:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233183(v=vs.110).aspx
* Type providers (type-safe data access):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh156509(v=vs.110).aspx
There are probably lots of other features that I have forgotten. I don't
think calling F# unoriginal is fair...
--
Alex Rønne Petersen
a...@lycus.org
http://lycus.org
