
Hi, an experienced person at our lab told me that the classification into generations has become unfashioned in the last decade; thus I think I will stay away from using it but argue with concrete abstraction features. Concerning the point someone made about the features of Haskell: * pattern matching: just case distinction * list comprehensions: syntactic sugar These are indeed local syntactic issues but the amount of such small things is essential to make things easy, in addition to semantic issues like laziness. Assume that you do not have them: then your programs would look as verbose as Java or LISP programs. If someone asks me for the generation level of Haskell, I will say 5, because there are only a few small functions you have to add to implement a small theorem prover; provocatively speaking: if these were in the prelude than Haskell was an artificial intelligence language. But perhaps such marketing statements are not convincing any more. -- Christoph