[Haskell-cafe] Re: OCaml list sees abysmal Language Shootout results

[Peter Achten]

At 03:32 PM 10/8/2004, Marcin Kowalczyk wrote:
>Andrew Butterfield <Andrew.Butterfield at cs.tcd.ie> writes:
>
> >>I though clean was always strict, and that was the major difference
> >>between clean and haskell (that and the fact clean is a proprietry
> >>language)
> >
> > No - Clean is pure and lazy like Haskell,
>
>But it uses explicit strictness annotations a lot, and provides strict
>and/or unboxed versions of various fundamental types (e.g. tuples),
>with some implicit coercions.

It is of course not the language that uses strictness annotations. Clean 
programs without strictness annotations are perfectly lazy. Clean has a 
powerful strictness analysis that includes only safe strictness to function 
arguments.

Programmers *can* include strictness annotations, exactly for the reasons 
that were mentioned in this thread, namely to influence the evaluation 
strategy in such a way that heap consumption and/or run time decrease. In 
addition, this can be done light-weight because annotations are added only 
to function argument types and data types, instead of modifying the code by 
inserting strict evaluator functions.

Regards,
Peter Achten


N.B.  My new email address is :  P.Achten at cs.ru.nl.
The University of Nijmegen has changed its name to Radboud University Nijmegen