Hello Jimmie, Tuesday, December 06, 2005, 9:14:37 AM, you wrote: JH> I would like to thank all who have replied to my inquiry. my two cents :) i'm not mathematician, but instead a professional programmer. i found that Haskell allow to write shorter, concise and robust programs. as Wirth says, "program = datastructures plus algorithms" and Haskell is excellent at expressing both data types and algorithms processing them the larger the project, the there is more meaning to use Haskell to implement it, because you get the possibility to construct language "dialect" which is better suits pecularities of this concrete project. just for example - even control structures i use in my program are written by me (and it is implemented very easy, just several lines each) but for the small projects real difference created not by general language features, but by features and environment, oriented toward this concrete field of application. and in area of scripting and web programming perl/ruby/python have much more specialization one time i tried to write Haskell and Ruby variants of small script that runs programs and bencmark its results. the main part of program was equally sized, but Haskell implementation required from me writing some small library of functions which are already present in all abovementioned languages - getFileSize, trimSpaces and so on so, for small scripting tasks you will not get benefits unless you are need to organize complex dataprocessing. and even to make par-to-par comparision with scripting languages, you are need to obtain libraries for RegEx matching, String processing, and filesystem operations i think, that the same applies to web programming - you need an additional libraries and even with them you will not get all benefits of Zope and RubyOnRails so, in my feel, Haskell is better in areas where there is no standard quick-and-dirty solutions and all languages are in equal conditions, but it can't compete with Visual Basic in user interfaces, Erlang in distributed processing, and Python in scripting JH> I've seen much of what OO provides, good and bad. I'm interested in a JH> good FP experience and it seems that Haskell can provide that. nevertheless, if you not only search for the faster way to create these scripts, but also to improve your programming skills, i recommend you to teach Haskell :) i even recommend you to spend just one day to read book about Python (or Ruby, which i love more :) just to get taste, and then go to teach Haskell seriously. these scripting languages are not very complex, nor very different from other languages. and in big contrast with Perl, they contains very little number of "special rules". so, reading the whole book about Python/Ruby in just one day is entirely possible to learn Haskell and run scripts i recommend to use Hugs (WinHugs to learn, if you are under Windows). my CMD instructed to run .hs files with "runhugs.exe +st.qkoOuI -98" i learned Haskell by "gentle introduction" but afair it had bad explanation of imperative programming in Haskell. if your book have a bad explanation of I/O in Haskell, try another book, or ask here. this area really not seriously more complicated than in other languages, despite its complex (but completelly hidden!) theoretical basis JH> Thanks again. We'll see if I can fit Haskell into my brain. Or at least JH> a sufficiently workable portion. :) to my taste, Haskell have the features from ususal languages (say, Java or Ruby) plus something more in areas of defining datastructures and algorithms. if you don't need to use more features in these areas than traditional languages provide, then there is no great meaning to learn Haskell -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com