[Haskell-cafe] saner shootout programs

PR Stanley prstanley at ntlworld.com
Sun May 11 16:57:29 EDT 2008


>I don't know Haskell very well, but


         Paul: "I'm not racist but . . ." :-)


>even I can tell, looking at, for
>example, the N-body benchmark, that the Haskell code is probably not
>type-safe, and the tricks used in it would not be usable in a larger
>program (see below).
>
>The task is essentially a pure computation: take a list of bodies
>having mass, position and velocity; apply Newton laws at discrete
>intervals for a large number of times; return new positions and
>velocities.
>
>I could write a C++ procedure that performs this task and have some
>piece of mind regarding its type correctness, exception safety and
>functional purity: side effects would be local to the procedure,
>arguments passed as const or by value, the result returned by value,
>no type casts or new/delete operators used.
>
>On the other hand, the Haskell code makes assumptions about the size
>of double-precision floats (obviously not type-safe). Further, the
>simulation is not a pure function.
>
>It is often argued that one only needs these dirty tricks in the most
>time-consuming functions. However, if using imperative programming in
>these "inner loop" procedures places them in IO monad, the "outer
>loops" (the rest of the program - procedures that call it) will have
>to go there as well. This makes me doubt the Haskell approach to
>functional programming.
>
>If anyone has a version of the N-body benchmark, where the simulation
>is a type-safe pure function, I would very much like to see and time
>it.
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