Christopher, On 16/03/2012, at 11:23 PM, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:
there is a question I have been thinking about a bit. In short, we could simply formulate it like this:
Are there any problems which cannot be solved a side effect-free language (such as Haskell)? In other words, are there problems that would explicitly demand semantics that can only be provided by a language allowing direct modification of external state variables, such as Java and C++?
If not, are there problems which are simply infeasible to solve with a side effect-free language?
Start here: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/geraint.jones/morehaste.html and dig through their references. I don't think "a logarithmic factor" is ever going to make the difference between feasible and infeasible. :-) cheers peter -- http://peteg.org/