Ketil Malde <ketil@ii.uib.no> writes:

...

This is close to my personal vision. That is, a language that handles both run-time and compile-time computations seamlessly. Thus, the compiler would evaluate as much as it can, and then what's left is put in the executable.

I must be missing something crucial here - I thought that was exactly what GHC did? I've certainly had it optimize toy benchmarks completely away... Could somebody elucidate, please?

I don't know what GHC does, but there are certainly reasons why you might not want to evaluate everything possible at compile time. For instance, there may be some sort of lookup table which is very large, but is fast to compute at runtime; you might not want to store the large table on disk in your executable. Carl Witty