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

Ch. A. Herrmann herrmann at uni-passau.de
Wed Sep 27 11:31:00 EDT 2006


Hi,

an experienced person at our lab told me that the classification
into generations has become unfashioned in the last decade;
thus I think I will stay away from using it but argue with
concrete abstraction features.

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

If someone asks me for the generation level of Haskell, I will say 5,
because there are only a few small functions you have to add
to implement a small theorem prover; provocatively speaking:
if these were in the prelude than Haskell was an artificial intelligence
language. But perhaps such marketing statements are not convincing any more.
--
Christoph


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