[Haskell-cafe] What *not* to use Haskell for

Arnar Birgisson arnarbi at gmail.com
Wed Nov 12 09:21:17 EST 2008


Hi Reinier,

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 14:22, Reinier Lamers <tux_rocker at reinier.de> wrote:
> Also, in my experience Haskell is not so good at data structures where
> you can't do structural recursion easily, like graphs. In such cases
> you want a language with easy pointers and destructive updates. You
> can do those things in pure Haskell by using
> the ST monad, but the code will be more verbose than in Java or C++,
> and it will occasionally drive you insane with type messages like the
> above (You thought you could use '$' freely instead of application?
> Wrong!).

Can you give examples of what you mean and why algebraic data types
are not sufficient? In my research most things are "structurally
recursive" and it was because Haskell is so good at such things that I
started using it.

cheers,
Arnar


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