[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

[brian]

On Nov 5, 2009, at 1:49 AM, David Virebayre wrote:

> I think that's in a way what's Bulat is saying : for Haskell to  
> really compete with C in *his view*, if I understand it, the  
> compiler has to be able to take idiomatic Haskell code, and  
> translate it in idomatic C code or better.
>
> Or said another way, we have to be able to write things like SDL,  
> jpeg or mpeg processing in Haskell, instead of writing bindings to C  
> libraries, without losing on performance.
>

And this is confusing to those of us who are not compiler experts.

Haskell knows when I have a list of Doubles, you know, because it's  
strongly typed.

Then it proceeds to box them. Huh ?

The laziness thing has many example od _reducing_ efficiency, but  
there seems to be a real lack of example
where it helps.  In fact it seems to _always_ hurt.  People sure seem  
excited about it.  Me, not so excited.

I've asked this question before and the answer, apparently, is  
polymorphism.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying :-)

Maybe the folks at MLTON will add type classes to ML ;-)

Brian