Re: Arrays vs Lists and Specialization

SAC has syntactic forms to define arrays that are somewhat reminiscent of array comprehensions, although they are much more restricted. An interesting route for a *real* array-optimizing Haskell compiler could be to try to find instances of array comprehensions that can be mapped to constructs corresponding to SAC's constructs, and then apply the compilation technology of SAC. An alternative is to make such constructs directly available in Haskell, so the programmer can be explicit whan performance is needed.

Also related is Manuel Chakravarty et al's array fusion (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/CK01.html) which hopefully will introduce array comprehensions into Haskell shortly (see http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/afp02/).