Re: [Caml-list] Purity and lazyness

[Eray Ozkural <examachine@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Holger Weiß wrote:
>
>  Simon Peyton-Jones argues like this:
>>
>> | Because Haskell is lazy it meant that we were much more consistent about
>> | keeping the language pure.  You could have a pure, strict, call by value
>> | language, but no one has managed to do that because the moment you have
>> | a strict call by value language, the temptation to add impurities (side
>> | effects) is overwhelming.  So "laziness kept us pure" is the slogan!
>>
>> [
>> http://www.techworld.com.au/article/261007/a-z_programming_languages_haskell/?pp=7]
>>
>>
> Unless there is some other driver to keep things pure even while being
> strict.  And I would argue there is- concurrency.  Concurrency has a lot of
> similarities with laziness, in that the ordering of computations can be (and
> often is) undefined, with all the fun that entails.  Haskell is really good
> at multithreaded because it has already "paid the price" of dealing with
> asynchronous computations.


Seconded. And probably more advanced compilers could make better decisions
at optimizing parallel execution.

Best,

-- 
Eray Ozkural, PhD candidate.  Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ai-philosophy
http://myspace.com/arizanesil http://myspace.com/malfunct

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