[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell vs OCaml

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

On Tue,  3 May 2005 15:41:22 -0700 (PDT)
Michael Vanier <mvanier at cs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> I also learned ocaml before learning haskell, 

I'm a long term C, Python and (yuck) C++ programmer who picked up Ocaml 
about 9 months ago. I picked Ocaml over Haskell because I thought I
needed objects, but I have yet to find a place where I actually needed
them because the Ocaml's variant types are so powerful.

The vast majority of my Ocaml code is purely functional and I'm quite
happy with higher order functions, closures, continuations and all
the other FP goodness.

I lurk here to expand my horizons :-).

> Another big difference between ocaml and haskell is that haskell has type
> classes and ocaml does not.

Type classes I grok and I can see their advantage.

> However, the biggest advantage that ocaml has over haskell is that for most
> applications, an ocaml program will run faster, perhaps a lot faster, than
> an equivalent haskell program

This for me is a big win because most of my code requires a lot of
pure number crunching.

That leaves one aspect of Haskell vs Ocaml I don't yet understand.
What are the advantages of lazy evaluation?

Cheers,
Erik
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  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam at mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
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