[Haskell-cafe] Haskell maximum stack depth

[Jonathan Cast]

On 28 Jan 2008, at 11:00 PM, Henning Thielemann wrote:

>
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Jonathan Cast wrote:
>
>> Or, to put it another way, the bugs Java's stack overflow is designed
>> to catch are considered good style in Haskell.
>
> I consider explicit recursion in Haskell as bad style. One should use
> higher order functions like 'map', 'fold', 'filter' and so on  
> whereever
> possible. Even if one needs explicit recursion one should separate the
> traversal through a data structure from the particular operation  
> applied
> to the elements.

Maybe so, but this approach is impossible in Java (and not just  
because of the limitation on the size of the stack).  Imperative  
programs tend to rely on a small number of loop constructs repeated  
over and over again; good style in Haskell is in part recognizing  
when new constructs are preferable and implementing them  
(recursively).  It's a completely different mindset.

jcc