[Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why functional programming matters

[Derek Elkins]

On Sat, 2008-01-26 at 20:49 -0500, Isaac Dupree wrote:
> Michael Reid wrote:
> > The 
> > power of Haskell's type system makes it feel like you are programming in 
> > a dynamic language to some degree, yet all of it is type-checked, and 
> > that is just *really* cool.
> 
> to some degree, (in current Haskell compilers), it *is* more like a 
> dynamic than a static language: except when optimized away, values of 
> all types are represented by a pointer to their actual value. (this 
> helps with parametric polymorphism and laziness (take :: Int -> [a] -> 
> [a]).) (at least this is a difference compared to C++)

Boxing is orthogonal to dynamic/static.  You can have boxing in
statically typed languages, e.g. Haskell, Java, C# and you can have
unboxed values in dynamically typed languages.