Joel Reymont skrev:
On Jul 5, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Niklas Broberg wrote:
Excellent example, thank you Niklas!
Are you using QuickCheck for verification?
I assume you're asking if Lava (rather than Niklas) uses QuickCheck. In Lava, you write properties in a style similar to QuickCheck props., but the actual verification is done by external tools. You still get the nice benefit of having description and verification within the same language. About teaching Lava (and probably other Haskell DSLs) to non Haskellers, I think that higher-order functions (and the type errors you get when using them incorrectly) is what causes most confusion among our students. A minority of them also finds it hard to use recursion instead of loops. Luckily, they don't have to use monads... I've been talking to a person at Intel who has been trying to teach their hardware designers to use a functional language (somewhat like Lava). This turned out to be much harder than expected, since the designers were so used to the imperative style. I'm not sure what the current status is, but they really have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to "convert" the designers and the quality (correctness/maintainability/performance/coding time/etc.) of the resulting code. It is important to show that functional programming has an advantage on the latter aspect (if that is the case). / Emil