[Haskell-cafe] I read somewhere that for 90% of a wide class of computing problems, you only need 10% of the source code in Haskell, that you would in an imperative language.

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Oct 1, 2009, at 8:53 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
> Sure. But what is a computer program?

It depends on the computer.  Classical machines do one thing,
data flow machines do another, reduction machines another.
I once saw a tiny machine at a UK university where the hardware
was a combinator reduction gadget.  It wasn't combinators on top
of conventional instructions, the hardware did nothing _but_
combinators.

A computer program, in short, is *whatever we want it to be*.
(Within reasonable limits.)