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

[Evan Laforge]

> 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 have a program that involves a somewhat involved "compilation"
pipeline.  As a result of laziness, it's all done incrementally and I
can start getting results right away, which is essential to my
application.  Without laziness I'd have to do something awkward and
complicated like break it into a lot of message passing threads or
process in chunks (and it's impossible to know how much context each
chunk will need without further hackery).  I can abort the computation
cleanly by simply stopping the consumer, and everything gets GCed.

And I get all sorts of convenient idioms like 'zip [0..]' and
calculating stuff in 'where' that I may not need.

And it's just fun.

So I'm still excited about it :)