On 29/09/2004, at 8:41 AM, Graham Klyne wrote:
I can see that this requires the original file to be kept for 3-time scanning, so enough memory for the entire file will be required. Is that *the* problem to which you allude? I can't see any other problem here. And why would this put Haskell at a disadvantage?
I've been watching this thread with interest, and posted my own thoughts on this thread and Haskell's performance in general as a blog entry. Rather than repeat it all here, I'll post a link to it: http://www.algorithm.com.au/mt/haskell/haskells_performance.html The executive summary of my thoughts is that it seems to be entirely possible to optimise Haskell to be competitive with other, more performance-focused languages, but it's hard, and you have to be a Haskell expert to do so. One possible solution may be to allow for some extra, syntactically integrated declarations to be inserted by the programmer which enables much better optimisation (e.g. see how to write unboxed strict array example in Clean: much more clear and less work than using IOUArrays). Performance is the one major reason I recommend many existing C programmers try out O'Caml rather than Haskell as their first functional programming language, and it would be really nice if optimisation was made a bit easier. -- % Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save