[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why?

Casey Hawthorne caseyh at istar.ca
Thu Dec 10 14:45:43 EST 2009


I have not read all/most of the replies.

>What material benefit does Haskell derive from being a "pure" functional language as opposed to an impure one? Please provide examples as I require instruction.
A pure functional lanugage allows lazy evaluation, which adds another
tool to your modularity toolbox, since it separates control from
computation.

In a pure functional language state is very carefully isolated from
the rest of your program.  This makes all sorts of optimizations
trivial that are very hard to do in other languages.  Optimizations
are done in "code algebra", which is very easy to do in Haskell (for
pure functions), for example optimizations are harder to do in the
"code algebra" of Java.

For a better discussion of "code algbra" please see the following
book:

"Practical Formal Software Engineering: Wanting the Software You Get"
Bruce Mills, 2009
--
Regards,
Casey


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