[Haskell-cafe] Theoretical question: are side effects necessary?

[Peter Gammie]

Christopher,

On 16/03/2012, at 11:23 PM, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:

> there is a question I have been thinking about a bit. In short, we could simply formulate it like this:
> 
> Are there any problems which cannot be solved a side effect-free language (such as Haskell)? In other words, are there problems that would explicitly demand semantics that can only be provided by a language allowing direct modification of external state variables, such as Java and C++?
> 
> If not, are there problems which are simply infeasible to solve with a side effect-free language?

Start here:

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/geraint.jones/morehaste.html

and dig through their references.

I don't think "a logarithmic factor" is ever going to make the difference between feasible and infeasible. :-)

cheers
peter

-- 
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