What does FP do well? (was How to get functional software engineering experience?)

[D. Tweed]

On Wed, 15 May 2002, Hal Daume III wrote:

> I tend to agree.  I keep meaning for experimental purposes to define a
> list type called AList or something which is syntactically identical to
> lists (i.e., you can use the familiar (:) and [] operators/sugar), but
> gets preprocessed out as actually being implemented with an array with a
> pointer to the "current" element.  Especially if we use unboxed types for
> such a thing, I imagine that on many applications this would give a boost
> in performance.

As a pointer, I vagueley recall Phil Wadler's (his homepage
currently seems to be
http://www.research.avayalabs.com/user/wadler/), way back in something
like 1984, was looking at something like this. The title was something
like "Listlessness is better than laziness". I never actually read a copy,
and don't know where you'd get one from, but if you are thinking about
this sort of thing semi-seriously it sounds like somehting worth
consulting.

HTH 

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