On 9 May 2008, at 6:59 am, Donnie Jones wrote:
I pasted a copy of the article below for those that cannot access the site.Why Ocaml Sucks Published by Brian at 6:49 pm under Functional Languages: Ocaml, Haskell
. An even better idea [for 'printf'] might be some variant of functional unparsing.
There's a link to http://www.brics.dk/RS/98/12/. I spent a bit of time last week playing with the code in that paper. Some of the basic ideas are nice; the idea that 'formats' are functions and concatenation of formats is composition of functions was particularly nice. But seeing it with Haskell eyes, the idea of building strings up using cascades of (basically) \s x -> s ++ f x, where s is a byte string, not a list, and ++ is concatenation of byte strings, seemed obviously wrong. I replaced it by \sl x -> f x : sl, with the final step (in an already existing interface function) being to reverse all the stringlet and concatenate them in one big step. I was gratified, but the very reverse of surprised, to get a substantial speedup. (A factor of over 100 for a small but non- trivial test, using SML/NJ.) In effect, thinking in terms of "shows" paid off handsomely. Haskell-think wins again!