[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell Speed

[Peter Simons]

Albert Lai writes:

 > For almost a decade, most (I dare claim even all) Pascal
 > and C compilers were "three-pass" or "two-pass". It means
 > perhaps the compiler reads the input two or three times
 > [...], or perhaps the compiler reads the input once,
 > produces an intermediate form and saves it to disk, then
 > reads the intermediate form from disk, produces a second
 > intermediate form and saves it to disk, then reads the
 > second intermediate form from disk, then it can produce
 > machine code.
 >
 > It must have been the obvious method, since even though
 > it was obviously crappy [...].

I beg to differ. Highly modular software is not necessarily
crapy if you're writing something as complex as a C or
Pascal compiler -- especially in times where RAM existed
only in miniscule amounts. A highly modularized algorithm
for counting lines, words, and characters in an input file,
however, is something altogether different. I doubt anyone
but the most inexperienced novices would have tried to do
that in three passes in a strict language.

Peter