[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is Haskell a 5GL?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Ch. A. Herrmann wrote:

> Concerning the point someone made about the features of Haskell:
> * pattern matching: just case distinction
> * list comprehensions: syntactic sugar
> These are indeed local syntactic issues but the amount of such small things
> is essential to make things easy, in addition to semantic issues like
> laziness.

According to
 http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/History_of_Haskell
   two main styles of functional programming have established:
"Declaration style" and "Expression style". The features you emphasize
support to the declaration style. I prefer mostly the expression style and
I don't feel I'm missing something important.

> Assume that you do not have them: then your programs would look
> as verbose as Java or LISP programs.

The notation
   [f x | x <- xs]
 describes operations on list elements, and looks like the imperative
  "forall x in xs do f x",
whereas
  map f xs
 is a list transformation. The second one is more abstract, isn't it?