On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

I'm afraid I don't understand why the program isn't a sieve. Is
the concern that the sequence of integers is thinned by dropping
composites rather than by merely marking them and counting across
them? Or is it that a trace of lazy evaluation will show that all
the divisibility tests on a single integer are clustered together
in time? Or something I haven't thought of?

When I reread Ertugrul's original email, I see that he's alerting to the danger of derision. There will be people who will mock Haskell for having an un-performant and un-Eratosthenian non-sieve on its front page.

As in, Haskell people don't even know their basic math, ha ha.

It used to be fibonaccis. That's too inviting of derision. Primes are more noble, so the thinking goes.

That very small space on the face of Haskell must perform incredible duties. Among them, it has to showcase beautiful syntax, see:

https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/issues/46#issuecomment-72331664

HTH,

-- Kim-Ee