Re: Functional Language wasRE: Re: declarative languag

--- bryan wrote:
> 
> >While XSLT is considered to be a functional language by experts in
> this 
> >field, it is definitely not a very nice representative of this class
> of 
> >programming languages. 
> 
> OOOOH that's a baaad thing you said. :) 

I'm just quoting Phil Wadler, who recently (at the School of Advanced
FP in Oxford, England, August) in his lecture about XQuery said that
"XSLT is probably the most used functional language and the ugliest
one".


> 
> Anyway, it seems to me that you prefer Haskell out of the various
> functional languages, do you have a particular reason for this? I
> have
> problems with Haskell, I've tried and I've tried but it's frankly
> quite
> hard for me to follow programs written in Haskell once they get
> beyond
> a
> couple pages when printed, for functional languages I prefer Lisp and
> Erlang. Especially Erlang. 
> 
> So anyway what do you like especially about Haskell? 


Strong typing, polymorphic types, type classes

Higher order functions

Huge expressiveness

Lazy evaluation + pattern matching

The (built-in support for the) very precise (monadic) approach to
encapsulating operations with side effects.


They even joke that once you have specified the types correctly, then
the solution just starts working... :o)  and in reality quite often
this is really the case.

But I'm not comparing Haskell to other languages, just saying that I
like it.



=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL

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