Re: Practicality of functional and logic languages? (long)

winikoff@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Michael David WINIKOFF) writes:
      >What about the power of the functional programming paradigm? Is there an
      >important class of problem which cannot be done by Functional Programming?


      [ A good Haskell implementation can use single threading to
          allow arrays to be updated in place ]


This is true, but Haskell supports monolithic array creation which means
that certain algorithms% can be expressed without requiring
(expensive/difficult) single threading detection. You can also have
imperative (i.e. guaranteed O(1)) arrays in a pure functional language as
long as they are wrapped up using continuations/monads. These allow
another set of problems to be dealt with (see recent messages in
comp.lang.functional).


bevan


% Examples of can be obtained by anonymous ftp from any of :-
ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk, ftp.cs.chalmers.se, nebula.cs.yale.edu
in the directory pub/haskell/library or pub/haskell/library/bevan at
Chalmers (this is the most up to date)
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