"Richard Underwood/Uhtenwoldt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> A simpler syntax with fewer levels of precedence. Maybe writing OCaml in >> S-expressions would be going too far, or maybe not. Clearly this would >> make it effectively a different language. > > Do you know enough about Haskell to have a definite opinion about its > syntax? > > (I think it is basically good though I would reduce the number of > levels of operator precedence a lot.)
Haskell has been my primary fun language for about seven years, and my primary employment language for about half a year. In my opinion, Haskell has advantages over OCaml in syntax, typeclasses, and community. I'd be happy to elaborate on any of these points if there's any interest. OCaml has advantages over Haskell in ability to decrease execution time without much effort, but at the expense of abstraction. In short, if you know C, you can make a roughly equivalent OCaml program that's anywhere from not quite as fast to faster than any given C program. Another difference is that OCaml allows mutable variables, and Haskell forbids them. OCaml is a strict language, Haskell is non-strict according to the standard, and most implementations use full laziness. Haskell is, in my opinion, better at abstractions than OCaml, but at the expense of requiring mental whole program analysis in order to understand non-strict evaluation. Also in my opinion, mutable variables require more whole program analysis than non-strict evaluation, but I don't know how many people agree with me. I'd roughly say that OCaml is the vi, and Haskell the emacs of FP :-) I do not think that either language is *better*. I instead think that people should try both and decide what fits their own approach to life. -- I've tried to teach people autodidactism, | ScannedInAvian.com but it seems they always have to learn it for themselves.| Shae Matijs Erisson
pgp94Myn46BFP.pgp
Description: PGP signature
