Re: [Haskell-cafe] Small question

On 8/10/07, Hugh Perkins wrote:

On 8/10/07, Stefan O'Rear wrote:

...

Haskell's purpose: To be a generally cool language Haskell's competition: C++, SML, ... hundreds of thousands more and I make no assertion of a representative sample ...

Well, C++ is not really competitive with Haskell, because C++ does not have a GC, and it's trivial to corrupt the stack/heap.

Beg to differ. I offer the following proof by contradiction. :-) In my current job, I had a version-1 implementation in Python which had severe performance problems, and was not amenable to concurrency (The Python interpreter has a global lock, so you can only execute python bytecodes from one thread at a time. :-(). The natural alternative implementation language was C++, but I argued successfully that a Haskell implementation would be significantly easier to make concurrent. Saying that it's trivial to corrupt the stack/heap in C++ is a bit like saying it's easy to fall of a bicycle. Sure it is, but there are also well understood techniques for avoiding doing so. :-) In C++ that I write, I almost never use bare pointers. Using auto_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, handle most of the memory management issues. When they don't, one can usually make a analogous class to manage the lifetime for you. cheers, Tom -- Dr Thomas Conway drtomc@gmail.com Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.