Derek Elkins wrote:
On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 18:49 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
Haskell is, in many ways, a descendant of Lisp. This does tend to lead to lists being *the* collection type, in my experience: sure, others get used, but lists are the ones you see in examples and such.
Not in my experience. Certainly lists are used all over the place*, but I rarely see them abused. Also, "lists" aren't lists in Lisp, they're more akin to rose-trees (or going the other way, there are only pairs in Lisp).
In practice, almost all Haskell programs use custom defined algebraic data types which are usually tree like. Declaring and using data types is easier in Haskell than it is in almost any other language.
True...
* As others have mentioned, lists represent loops and loops are extremely common in programming in general.
Um... surely *every* collection type represents a loop?