brian
Haskell knows when I have a list of Doubles, you know, because it's strongly typed.
Right - so you can do foo, bar :: [Double] foo = 1:2:3:foo bar = [1,2,3,undefined,4,5,6]
Then it proceeds to box them. Huh ?
Otherwise, the above wouldn't work. For lists of known constants, they could be unboxed and packed into an array. But that means you'd have to have two different types of lists, and if you really want an unboxed array, why not use one explicitly?
The laziness thing has many example of _reducing_ efficiency, but there seems to be a real lack of example where it helps. In fact it seems to _always_ hurt. People sure seem excited about it. Me, not so excited.
Well - it allows me to easily process files larger than memory. Many of my programs tend to follow a pattern like (build operation based on command line switches etc) writeFile of =<< map operation . readFile if Lazy bytestrings is my current favorite, since it reads bytes in an efficient, packed format, presents a list-like interface, and is chunkwise lazy, so streaming can be done in constant time. The "build operation" part often ends up a bit gross, but I have a plan for that which I hope to come back to later on.
I've asked this question before and the answer, apparently, is polymorphism.
Really? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants