Re: [Caml-list] How to do this properly with OCaml?

[skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

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On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 20:10 -0500, Brian Hurt wrote:
> 
> Note that languages encourage or discourage certain styles of programming. 
> For example, C++, and to a lesser extent Java and C#, rather strongly 
> discourages an applicative style of programming- primarily due to the 
> costs of allocation.  You can do it, but it's going to be a fairly serious 
> perfomance hit.  

I agree with your assertion but not the reason you cite for it.
The real reason it is discouraged is the lack of lexical 
scoping.

I cite Felix as a counter example: the current implementation
provides lexical scoping and functional programming in the
ML style is simple and easy. Yet the stack frames are indeed
allocated using malloc in the standard driver.

For some classes of problems, the lack of performance here
just isn't an issue -- especially as the optimiser eliminates
almost all closures. 

[The real problem in Felix is the the collector cannot
be run inside functional code, because there is no way
to predict the structure of the machine stack: procedural
code doesn't use the machine stack]

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>


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