[Haskell-cafe] Re: How much of Haskell was possible 20 years ago?

[Maurí­cio]

 >>> It seems you decided to ignore my message. OK.
 >>
 >> Whoa there!  Why assume malice?  I got both his
 >> quoted response and your message at about the
 >> same time (...)
 >
 > (...) *dismisses* Gofer, as something so old
 > that it couldn't be possibly related to modern
 > languages. Mind you, Mark Jones did it before
 > 1994,(...) OK, don't shout, I know I
 > exaggerate...  What I found somehow funny, with
 > all respect, is the combination: 20 years ago,
 > which means '87, and miserable 4M of memory. At
 > that time 4M on a personal computer was not so
 > frequent, at least in Europe.  Jerzy
 > Karczmarczuk

Sorry, Jerzy. Brandon message was just faster to
answer, I'll need some time to check Gofer. I also
wrote PC-AT with 256KB in my original message, but
I changed it to 386 since I didn't want you guys
to feel under an attack from reactionarys. People
feelings are easy to hurt, and it's difficult to
please everyone :)

20 years ago, I wrote a brute force attack on a
magazine game, but when my TK-3000 Apple found an
answer the due date had long passed and I could
not get a prize from the magazine. In '92, when my
family got a PC-AT, the same game was solved in 5
minutes, so to this day that PC is still my
psicological reference of "all the power I
need". I enjoyed a Prolog compiler in that system,
and my intuition says Haskell could also fit
there. And, at the same time, today operating
systems are happy to announce how easily they
turn your dual-core into a great video cassette
:(

Anyway, what I would like would be a "theoretical"
answer. Is there something fundamentally diferent
between a C compiler and a Haskell one that makes
the former fits into 30Kb but not the other? If
so, what compiler algorithms are those, and what
are they theorical needs? I really don't need an
easy answer. If you guys just sugest me computer
theory books I will be happy to look for them, but
today I wouldn't know what to read.

Best,
Maurício