[Haskell-cafe] Reflections on the ICFP 2009 programming contest

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:51:43PM +0400, Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
> I was excited when I read about the VM - I'd imagined all sorts of cool 
> things, like assembler, linker, compiler (for something C-like), maybe 
> even debugger... And what a disappointment it was when I understood that 
> nothing of this kind is needed.

Yeah, those were my thoughts at first too. It took me a couple readings
to realize it was simply to give it machine-independence. But perhaps
realizing that was part of the challenge :). The fact it didn't have any
looping meant that it wasn't even fully turing complete and you probably
couldn't speed it up much anyway, it already had an intrinsically short
running time.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/