Conversion/porting to "mainstream" languages

[Ketil Z. Malde]

Mark Carroll <mark@chaos.x-philes.com> writes:

> One criticism I've received of the suggestion that we use Haskell in our
> business is that some particularly large clients will demand code in some
> 'standard' language

> How big a project would it be to translate, say, from Haskell to C
> or Java? 

How about `Standard' ML?  Shouldn't be too hard, since you could reuse
more of the structure than you could for C, I imagine.

Common Lisp is probably also easier to translate to, and fairly
`standard'.

> I suppose that at least something to translate Haskell to Java
> bytecode would be useful someday, and then you could 'decompile'
> back to Java

This sounds about as useful as using generated (intermediate) C from
GHC.  If your client is really daft, they might buy that, but I think
it is just about guaranteed to be unmaintainable :-)

I'm in the unfortunate situation that, if my current programming
effort turns out to be a success, I may have to rewrite the whole
thing in order to

    a) squeeze the last few drops of memory consumption from it
and b) run it on large multi-CPU machinery

Any suggestions for a suitable language?  My program isn't overly
complex, nor does it depend much on laziness, so I could get by with
C. 

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants